The following is a conversation with Michael Malis.
This is a special holiday episode and it is made extra special because it's announcing
the release of Michael's new book called The White Pill, A Tale of Good and Evil.
Michael and I disagree on a lot of ideas in politics and philosophy and we have a lot
of fun disagreeing.
But there's no question that he has a deep love for humanity and puts his heart and
soul into his work, especially into this heart-wrenching, deeply personal book.
So I ask that you support him by buying it at whitepillbook.com that should hopefully
forward to the Amazon page.
As always, we each dressed up in a ridiculous outfit without coordinating for the chaos
that makes life so damn interesting.
This episode is full of humor, darkness and love, which is the best way to celebrate the
holidays.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Michael Malis.
We probably should have coordinated this better, shouldn't we?
Yeah.
I think so.
Have you, since this is a Christmas special, a holiday special, have you been a good or
a bad boy, Michael, this year?
Well, that's interesting.
One of the people in the book, Granville Hicks, his autobiography starts with, I was a good
boy and he wasn't a very good boy.
At a scale of 1 to 10.
I'm trying to think of what bad things I've done.
Oh, okay.
There's that.
Okay.
Wait.
That's not, that was, that was not it.
That's all right.
I would say nine.
Nine?
Yeah.
I try to do the right thing.
Okay.
What are you?
Is it going to be a one or a zero?
Yeah.
No, I'm extremely self-critical.
I pushed the zero.
I reached for the zero.
Well, mission accomplished.
So this, this episode is announcing the release of The White Pill, a book you wrote.
Yeah.
Which is, I've gotten the honor, the privilege, the pleasure of being one of the first people
to read it.
You're the first.
So I'm really, I don't know if nervous is the word, but you are the first person who
has read it that I am speaking to about it.
My first, my last, my everything.
Yes.
I'm speaking to all the girls, but I'll take it, all the fembots, all the fembots.
But yeah, it was a truly incredible book.
It's basically a story of evil in the 20th century.
And throughout it, you reveal a thread that gives us hope.
And that's the idea of the white pill.
So there's the, the blue pill and the red pill.
There's the black pill, which is a kind of deeply cynical, maybe apathetic, just giving
up on the world, given that you see behind the curtain and given that you don't like
what you see, given that there's so much suffering in the world, you give up.
That's the black pill and the white pill, I suppose is, even though you acknowledge that
there's evil in the world, you don't give up.
Yes.
So if you're listening to this and you're a fan of this podcast, you go to whitepillbook.com
and it'll go to it.
Whitepillbook.com.
And if you don't know how to spell, we'll probably have a link that you can click on.
So for people who also don't know, Michael Malis is not just a troll, not just a hilarious
comedic genius who hosts his own podcast, but he is an incredible, brilliant author.
Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography Kim Jong-il, so that's a story of North Korea,
the new right to journey to the fringe of American politics.
That's the story of the extremes of the United States political movements and then the anarchist
handbook that's talking about the ideologies, the different flavors of ideologies of anarchism.
But on top of that, you're now going in, going into the darkest aspects of the 20th century
with the Soviet Union and the communism with the white pill.
So let me ask you, let's start at the beginning.
At the end of the 19th century, as you write the term socialist, communist and anarchist
were used somewhat loosely and interchangeably because the prophesied Marxist society was
one in which the state had famously withered away.
There was a great disagreement about what a socialist system would look like in practice,
but two things were clear.
First, that socialism was both inevitable and scientific, the way of the future.
And second, that the capitalist ruling class were not going down without a fight.
So what are the key points of disagreement between the socialist and anarchist, the communists
along that at that time, at the beginning, at the end of the 19th century, at the beginning
of the 20th century, the possibility of the century laid before us that eventually led
to the first and the second world war?
The idea when the industrial revolution came and Marx was very much a product of industrial
revolution or a thinking was, okay, now that we have technology, now that we have science,
we can scientifically manage society.
We saw this very much with Woodrow Wilson and this kind of idea of progressivism that we
could use technology and not capitalism.
In their view, unfettered capitalism was wasteful.
You're making too much stuff.
You have surpluses.
You have shortages.
If we produce just exactly what we need and you have these people, engineers, they're
engineering society, then everyone will be happy and you don't have to have any suffering
or waste.
So socialism at that time was used as a broad umbrella.
It's not used in the term that it means today of necessarily state socialism.
It just meant the idea of having societies scientifically run.
So you had a huge argument, there are different wings, you even had it from the beginning
with Marx versus Bakunin because Marx was for obviously state socialism, the absolute
state running everything, although even with Marx and Engels, it was a means to an end.
After man is remade in his very nature, then the state withers away and everyone's equal
and you have this kind of heaven on earth situation.
Bakunin was the opposite.
He regarded the state as inherently immoral and wanted to have kind of like workers'
collectives and things like that and ultra-localized control.
So the end was always stateless.
It's just that some people viewed the state as a convenient, effective, intermediate state.
Well, I think at least Marx and Bakunin, there were plenty of others who just regarded it,
have the workers control the production via the state.
By the way, how does my hat look?
It looks great, festive.
It's good.
Is this side better than the other side?
I think you want it on this side so people can see you.
Oh, no, no, no.
I want to...
You know, like when you have hair over your head.
It's called Veronica Lake, I think was her name.
And then I just glance flirtatiously towards the camera sometimes.
Well, I've got to state, don't go any further, sure.
Yeah, put on gloves.
Oh, no glove, no glove.
The bad aspect of white gloves is the blood stains them.
You have to get new ones every time.
And now I glance flirtatiously after that.
I'm sorry.
Okay, Bakunin and Marx, go ahead.
So there were other socialists who did not regard this kind of end times where the state
went the other way at all.
And there were various strains in between where you'd have some capitalism and some
socialism, the concept of a safety net came out of socialist thinking.
The Labour Party came out of the Fabian Socialists in Great Britain.
Their logo was a wolf in sheep's clothing.
And then when that was too on the nose, they changed it to a tortoise meaning we're going
to get to socialism slowly in the sense of either gradualism or boiling a frog.
And also the big part of this thinking at the time, this is again the late 19th century,
is the idea that there's going to be a worldwide workers' revolution.
It wasn't going to be that in one country it was going to happen and then all the other
country would be capitalist.
The idea was, all right, the workers in Germany have more in common with the workers in America,
than the workers in Germany have with the capitalists in Germany.
So the idea is, all right, like the working class all over the world at one point, they're
going to be like, we're being exploited, it's getting worse and worse for us, we can't feed
our families, we're getting injured and so on and so forth, and there's no compensation
for this.
We're just going to overthrow our chains and we're going to run everything ourselves.
We're the ones running it already anyway.
And this was a-
Doing all the work.
And we're doing all the work.
So why should we be getting all the benefit?
What's the role of violence in all of this?
So this was a big source of contention.
So the Fabians, for example, in Britain, who are all socialists, they were very heavily
of the idea that we can do this through the ballot box.
We can advocate and agitate and get the people to be voting for their own self-interest and
furthering the state at the expense of the capitalist class.
And there were the people who were the hardcore anarchists who were voting changed anything
that wouldn't let us do it.
And the only way to have a revolution is to have a revolution, to kill, to overthrow,
to seize these factories.
And this was a big argument.
And it also fed into the idea of where does free speech end?
Is it legal to be giving speeches advocating for violence and revolution?
Is it legal?
Johann Most, who I discussed in the book and in the anarchist handbook, he published a
book in the 1800s about how to build dynamite and how to build bombs.
And this is a big free speech concern at the time because now anyone in their own house
can make a bomb and kill lots of people.
And this is something that was happening with enormous frequency at the time.
People tend to think because we have these kind of prejudices or we only remember what's
happening now.
But World War II, World War I got started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
There were lots of people, McKinley is another one who I discussed in the book, his assassination.
There was lots of violence happening very regularly.
And with the creation of dynamite, it kind of exponentially became more dangerous and
threatening.
And on Wall Street, there was a bomb that went off, I think, in the 1920s.
And the shards of shrapnel are still in the JP Morgan building, I believe.
Do you ever think if you were alive during that time, what you would be doing?
You think of yourself as an anarchist.
Would you be...
Where would you be?
Would you be a socialist, a communist?
Which parties would you attend, figuratively and literally?
Well, the thing that was so interesting back then is there was a woman named Mabel Dodge
Lujan, and she ended her days in Taos, New Mexico, she found an artist colony.
And she had an apartment on 9th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, a shadow salon.
And everyone got together and talked, and you'd have Emma Goldman, who's an anarchist,
Margaret Sanger, who invented Planned Parenthood and advocated for birth control.
And you'd have the people from the Wobblies, the hardcore labor unions.
And everyone kind of...
Edgel Mankin didn't attend, but he was friends with them all.
So there was this very weird with the birth of modernism in art and in kind of modernist
thinking.
There was this idea, like, all right, this was the first time where you could be intellectual
as a class, where there really was this space for people who were thinkers.
And they just sat around being like, all right, what are we going to do with ourselves?
And you had it in modern art, you had it in literature, you had it in politics.
So it was a very exciting time where people were like, all right, everything is now
on the table, what are we going to do with this?
And they very much were aware that this was a break with the pre-industrial revolution
kind of farmer labor era.
Do you think for you, violence would be compelling?
No.
First of all, I'm just too small.
But second, I just...
Dynamite doesn't care about your size.
Yeah, but I mean, retribution does.
And I think, I don't know, but to me, violence is the kind of thing where you think you're
running it, but it's running you.
Once you cross that line, violence sings its own song.
So whenever I hear even contemporary times where people are advocating for violent actions,
it's like, when you start a fire, you're not like, I'm just going to burn down this house.
And there's many cases over and over of people who are building bombs or trying to assassinate
someone or things like that.
And it ended up literally, literally, literally blowing up in their own face.
And violence doesn't really work necessarily because if you have an assassination, you're
not assassinating the presidency.
If you take out a president, there's another president instantly there.
So what have you accomplished?
Someone's husband, dad is gone.
You replaced him with someone who now is in a position to crack down and retaliate with
even more violence.
So the calculus for me isn't there.
Would I be advocating for then?
Who knows?
But I mean, I don't know if I'd be able of the space to be, I certainly wouldn't have
the space to be a podcaster or like a media personality.
That wasn't really a thing.
To some extent, it was in the 1920s with the Algonquin round table and all the people from
the New Yorker magazine, but they were all drunks.
It was very much a weird kind of situation to be a thinker.
What would you think you'd do?
Work at a carnival?
You look good in lipstick.
So.
Well, thank you.
I look good in anything.
What would I, I don't know.
I mean, you're not building robots.
I mean, you could have been a Tesla, right?
Okay.
I didn't mean a car.
I meant the person.
I understand.
Oh, thank you for explaining the witty comments to me.
It wasn't witty at all because you went to Einstein because he was an immigrant.
So I wouldn't work with an immigrant.
What does that even mean?
No, you would have been a Tesla-like figure.
There's already a Tesla.
So you wouldn't literally be Tesla.
That's why I said a Tesla.
Oh, a Tesla.
Okay.
So, all right.
I take you for the explanation.
See, Michael doesn't only make funny things.
He also explains them for you.
It wasn't funny.
Man's plays them.
It wasn't funny at all.
That I agree with.
Okay.
Okay.
So yes, when you achieve.
See, this is why Kanye didn't like you.
It's this.
All right.
I'm downgrading you from a nine down to an eight.
If you keep talking like this, a five is a real possibility.
All right.
So, the kind of vacuum that's created with violence is usually filled with a harsher
figure.
So you don't think violent revolution ultimately leads to positive progress in the short term.
Well, sometimes it does.
The American Revolution, I think, was a positive example.
And overthrowing the czar, which was done peacefully, was a positive example.
But again, when violence happens, people get scared and they want the violence stopped
immediately and that's a call for authoritarianism and you see it time and time again.
And they also want retribution.
They were like, bring this back to normal and they don't really worry about things like
civil liberties or things like that.
It's a very, and then it also creates this space for invasion from foreign sources or
demagogues, like, oh, look, they're killing us in the streets.
Now you got to support me.
It's a very deadly game, obviously.
I remember somebody told me that, I forget where it was, but they told me that from the
very beginning it was obvious that communism is an evil system or a system that leads
to evil.
And to me, at least that's not, if I had to put myself in the beginning of the 20th century
or at the end of the 19th century, that's totally not obvious.
They are trying to elevate humanity, the basic worth of a human being, of a hard-working
human being, of the working class, of the people that are doing the work and are striving
and just really trying to build up society with their own hands.
It seems like a beautiful ideal.
So I guess the question is, can you see yourself believing in that, in the ideas of socialism
and communism?
Yeah, let's say if you were living in Russia.
Oh, yeah, easily.
So first of all, I don't think anything is obvious in politics.
It's not obvious that, you know, humans have rights.
It's not obvious that liberty is better or the markets either, whether you're for a welfare
state or you're for more free markets, not that those is obvious.
Both of them involve an enormous amount of thought and background information.
So when someone says something is obvious in politics, they really mean something is
apparent.
Well, it's not apparent on its face that if we all get together and promote a society
based on equality and we all chip in that it's going to really be good for everyone.
I mean, that to me is the promise of communism.
And it was also very appealing to many people because it was new.
So the idea was, all right, we've tried it these other ways.
There's all these negative consequences.
You have all these slums.
You have people getting, you know, fired and then they have no recourse.
You have women with 10 kids and they can't feed their kids infant mortality.
You don't have sanitation.
You don't have food, you know, everyone's illiterate and uneducated.
You know, then you're saying, look, if we all chip in together, everyone will have clothes.
Everyone will have food.
Everyone will be educated.
Everyone will do their part.
It's going to be rough in the short period.
That's a very compelling case to be made for communism.
It's really easy in many ways when something hasn't been tried to make it sound compelling
because you just talk about how great it's going to be.
Then no one, you know, people are always arguing about how like Venezuela and Sweden, like,
you know, you want democratic socialism to be like Sweden.
You don't want to be like Venezuela.
The Venezuelans didn't vote for Venezuela.
They voted for Sweden.
They ended up with Venezuela.
So it's, I think, and the thing with the communism, especially at that era, it was very much a
correlated with people who were too smart for their own good because they had the idea
that if we're just put in charge instead of these like business for people or these heirs
to great estates, if the people who are smart and get it like us, I don't mean you and me,
like the people at the time who are advocating for it, once we're in charge, since we're
good people and we want what's best for everyone, we're going to make sure everyone's taken
care of.
And you know, they always talked about how much they cared about the little guy.
And so I'm sure some of them meant it a lot and like, look, if the guy in charge is very
much concerned with the little guy, he's not going to slip between the cracks and it's
just going to be absolutely great.
And we don't have to worry about, you know, the capitalist class just basically exploiting
people and having these huge estates while these people can't even feed their own families.
Since we have a little bit of momentum, can you still man the case for socialism?
At that time, and even today, I don't know if it's, I don't know if there's a rhyme and
a similarity to those, to socialism as implemented at that time and what could possibly be implemented
today, but maybe you can dance between the two.
The steelman argument for socialism is if you have everything up to private industry,
you do not have a guarantee that someone won't fall between the cracks.
And the other concern is in any other context, if someone is let's suppose mentally ill,
right, through no fault of their own or someone's handicapped, you know, they can't feed themselves
or mentally disabled or something like that.
If you have everything up to charity, you see this with endangered species, right?
The species that are cute, it's easy to raise money for them or protect them.
Some weird kind of frog somewhere that no one cares about, you can't raise money for
it.
People's interests are to what they find interesting.
So if someone is someone who's like not socially appealing in some way, whatever capacity,
they're going to fall between the cracks and they're screwed.
Under socialism, if you have a government taking care of everything, no one is left
behind.
You are guaranteed that the lowest of the low and the worst of the worst are still going
to make sure that they're not starving the street or just left behind.
So that is a big moral case to be made for having the state running everything.
In terms of economics, it's a lot harder, but the argument there would be it's why
it's not fair, a term which in my view does not actually have a good meaning, but it's
not fair that because you were born a Rockefeller and I was born in Poland that you never have
to worry about food for the rest of your life, whereas I have to worry about paying for a
doctor for my kid.
Like you just won this lottery when you're born and now I have to be screwed and I have
to respect all your property, why?
So that is another strong argument to be made for socialism.
And the other argument is if you have a media apparatus that is operated under profit seeking
principles, it is going to feed into people's worst qualities, most basic animal like qualities
and sensationalist qualities, and will be used as a mechanism for capitalist control.
Whereas if the government, which represents all of us, all of us is running things, then
everyone will have a right to have their voice heard and won't be manipulated.
That's the argument.
It's about the reaching towards the stateless version because you espouse the ideas of anarchism.
It kind of has the same conclusion, which is reaching towards the removal of the state
to where we, I guess, have some distributed reallocation of resources that are quote unquote
fair.
But the thing is the Marxist vision of the state withering away and becoming anarchism,
it's really kind of like the underpants gnomes, because it's like-
Tell me more.
Well, step one, you have Marxism-
Tell me slowly.
I'm sorry.
You have full communism, the state's running everything, including education.
Step two, question mark, step three, anarchism.
So their idea was that after enough time, the nature of man himself was going to change.
And then the government would be superfluous because we would all be equal and we would
all naturally or socially, whatever term they would use, want to act the part that we would
need to do.
And in fact, Reagan had a great joke about this where there were two commissars, I think,
in Moscow, and one of them, they're walking around there going, is this it?
Is this full?
Have we done it?
Have we reached full communism?
The other goes, oh no, it's going to get a hell of a lot worse.
So that's kind of the counter-argument to that.
Do you think culture, society can change the nature of man?
No.
So no matter, you don't think this idea that, for example, America has been founded on,
that all men are created to equal, that that idea can't permeate the culture and thereby
change how we see each other, how we think of the basic worth of a human being and thereby
change our nature?
That's epigenetic.
I don't think that that changes the nature of man.
I think, for example, if I say someone, which I agree with, that someone is innocent so
proven guilty, they're not literally innocent.
They're regarded in a legal context as innocent, but that person is or is not a murderer or
thief or so on and so forth.
So we can legally and ethically regard everyone as equal, but as Thomas Sowell pointed out,
a human being isn't even equal to himself over the course of a day, twins who are genetic
clones are not equal to one another.
So it is an important thing legally and it's a good yardstick, but it's not literally true.
But don't you think that law becomes ethics?
So that idea of justice starts to internalize it, the way we behave, the way we think about
the world.
And I think it's a complete red herring because no one is-
No, you're a red herring.
Okay.
See what I did there.
Because people are still going to always prefer their family to strangers or they're
in group to out group.
So in terms of if you're going to have equality, that means it's going to not matter to you
whether someone is your mom or someone down the street and I don't see how that will ever
become the case.
Do you think it would be possible if you were an intellectual like you are at the beginning
of the 20th century, would you be able to predict the rest of the 20th century?
No.
I don't think at all.
I think there were so many out of nowhere turns that no one would have seen them coming.
For example, Lenin seizing power and making the Bolshevik Revolution a reality was regarded
as utopian and insane.
The fact that he pulled it off is close to miraculous and it was quite literally unprecedented.
So that's a very big one.
Which aspect of it, sorry to interrupt, which aspect was hard to predict that a singular
figure with just some ideas would be able to take so much power?
Can we maintain that power and remake that society so drastically so quickly despite
such opposition?
Also, not just a set of temporary protests by hooligans that lead to turmoil in the short
term but then stabilizes but literally changes the entirety of the society.
Yeah.
Ludendorff, who is the German general, he's like, all right, we got to get the Russians
out of World War I.
He's the one who's like, all right, let's get this lunatic Lenin who already tried and
failed to have a revolution in Russia.
Let's send him back there and he's just going to cause problems to everybody and it's going
to be great because it's going to weaken Russia and then our eastern front isn't going to
have to be a problem.
And then to his surprise and everyone else's, including anarchists and communists worldwide,
they pulled off this October Revolution.
And then for a while, it's like, all right, I mean, I think my understanding is even people
at the time in St. Petersburg and in Moscow were like, what does this even mean?
No one took it seriously.
And then very quickly, you had the Cheka and the secret police and all these other kind
of implementations of the communist state and people like, oh, they're not messing around.
But they're like, all right, this is not going to last for long.
And the USA, the US&A, we didn't even recognize the Soviet Union's legitimacy for a very long
time.
There were no diplomatic relations.
And at a certain point, it's like, if you don't recognize Lenin and Stalin's government,
use the government of Russia or the Soviet Union.
Is it the Tsar?
Like you have to recognize that it's just, they're not going anywhere.
So that was something that was not, I think, very predictable.
The Great Depression, in retrospect, there were certain things that were predictable,
but it was not at all the case that it needed to last as long as it did in the States as
FDR made it do.
So there's all sorts of things.
I mean, if they fought Germany's remilitarization, World War II could have been prevented.
If you didn't have the Treaty of Versailles, would you have the hyperinflation, would
you have Hitler?
These are all, I think, choose your own adventure moments where things could have gone in other
directions.
I don't believe this kind of idea, this is a very Marxist idea that history is inevitable.
And once you start with certain premises, the contradictions kind of unfold, I think
it's ridiculous.
I feel that there's power in the Santa Claus outfit.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a fundamentally communist idea, right?
How?
Santa Claus.
Arbitrary redistribution of wealth.
It's not redistribution.
Well, at least I decide who's good and bad.
Only I, only I know this.
And I mean, I am somehow getting funding from someone, right?
No.
Okay.
Listen, I have so much to teach you.
You have a workshop.
You go, workshop, yeah.
And how many people do you think are employed in this workshop?
They're slaves.
Yes.
I don't know.
How many elves are in the workshop?
I think the rest of you are going to have to look into it.
No, anyway, and the red colors and everything.
Is that the biggest holiday of all time, Christmas?
Like just in terms of the intensity of the festivities?
No.
I think Christmas is a very recent phenomenon.
I think historically it was not a big deal.
No, I know.
Okay, it's not been, but in terms of how much it captivates, how intense it is, I guess
from a capitalist perspective, like how much is going on, how visual it is, how intense
it is, how it grabs a whole population.
I think it's because the idea of Christmas is probably one of the most powerful holiday
ideas.
Easter's probably up there.
Easter's obviously up there because you have Christ dying, his resurrection.
So that's kind of a big one.
But Christmas is this symbol of brotherhood and kindness and magnanimity.
One of the things I despise about our culture is this, and something I'm fighting very heavily
with this book, or at least attempting to, is this glorification of cynicism.
This kind of like, oh, you like this song, that's cute, stupid.
Whereas Christmas is the one time of year where you could be happy and joyous and kind,
and people don't get to roll their eyes at you.
They get to stop being too cool for school, and they get to be like, you know, I enjoy
your friendship, you're my sister, my brother, my dad, my mom, whatever.
And it's the, you know, I was Ayn Rand's favorite holiday.
I adore it, especially Christmas in New York.
And it's just this idea of like, even though we're cold, and it's dark outside, you know,
it's still kind of like, it's still cozy, and you, and the next, let's hope the next
year is, because with, with, with Russians, Santa comes on New Year's.
So it's kind of like, let's make this next year an even better one.
So it's very much the holiday of hope and joy.
And like, love for family, for friendship.
And kindness and benevolence, yeah.
And like, almost the whole, that whole rat race of chasing material possessions and all
that gets put on hold for a beef moment, and just all goes quiet.
But it's also about giving people material possessions, like here, like I value you,
if this is something that brings you joy.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right in the book, which by the way, people should go get, buy it right now.
If you support this podcast, or if you support the Ridiculous Office that Michael's wear,
wears, the more books you buy, the more outfits he is going to wear.
I've got two, my next two appearances on the show, assuming I don't burn this bridge.
I've got some good ones.
This bridge has been burning for a long time.
We've been, we've been going across the road by canoe at this point.
Next time we're going to be swimming.
How the hell are you going to swim?
You're made out of lead.
Yes, true.
Sink to the bottom, get dragged across by rope.
Okay.
You write in the book, cynics like to lie and call themselves realists, hoping for positive
outcomes can thus be dismissed as being naive or utopian.
Can you elaborate on this point?
Just like you said right now, I mean, it seems like a, I don't know if it's a fundamental
characteristic of our society today or just societies throughout history, but there is
a cynicism.
You write in the Soviet Union, it was really, there's a deep cynicism.
That was good at the end, yeah.
But there is a cynicism today as well, at least in like public discourse.
Why does it happen and how can we fight it?
I think it is easy to be like, everything sucks.
I had my friend Lux, she was a blogger and she was an author.
She had this great line because we worked in media and she's like, if you're at a party
and someone starts talking about a new app or website and you don't know anything about
it, just say, oh, I was on that for a while, it sucked and that's all you need to say.
I'm like, Lux, that's a great line.
But I think it is, and especially I'm sure you experienced this as well with your family,
I certainly did with mine.
There is this idea, especially in Russian culture, but in American culture to some extent
as well, where if you have aspirations, I remember there was this show called Russian
Dolls.
It was, oh, I just got it, like the Matryoshka, okay, I just got it, that's the name, okay.
The show is called Russian Dolls.
It was about Brighton Beach, which is the Russian Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.
It was supposed to be their version of Jersey Shore.
It was on Lifetime and it had no ratings and I remember the last four episodes, they had
to burn them so they just ran it through like 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. one day.
And there was this one scene where one of the girls, I forget her name, probably Natalia,
and she'd been in college and she had been wondering what she wanted to major in, right?
And this story was so perfect, I'm sure I've told it before.
And she took an aptitude test and she went with her mom to get like many patties or something.
And she goes, mom, you know, I've had like 80 majors, I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And she goes, I took this aptitude test, it really made sense to me.
I am going to go to law school, I want to be a lawyer and there's something I enjoy.
And the first thing out of her mom's mouth is how you're going to pay for it.
And the girl, and I really relate it because if you didn't have this Russian upbringing,
you watched it, you would think her reaction was completely insane.
She just lost it, just screaming.
She's like, people pay for law school all the time.
I'll figure out a way.
Why is your first reaction to look for a problem?
Why is your first response to be like, oh, are you sure you've thought this through?
I have been struggling with one problem for years, what I wanted to do for a living.
And now like as soon as I solve this one big problem by identity,
your first reaction is like, let's find a new problem.
Why is that you're, instead of let's figure out how we're going to pay for it?
And that kind of approach is so deadly and it, it gnaws at you.
And I always, I don't like giving people advice because I'm cool with the hell am I?
And also if I don't know the context of the problem, I'm not informed enough to give advice.
But this is piece of advice that I do for comfort giving.
If you are someone who has around you, people who as soon as you have any accomplishment or any hope
that their first reaction is to be like, well, what about this?
You have to get rid of them or sit them down, maybe give them a chance.
Because that is something that is so demoralizing and it drains you.
And it's like, you know, the example I've used all the time, all the time, all the time.
I say, if you want to be an author, right, you can go to any bookstore
and look at all the shitty, shitty books like the white pill.
And you could say to yourself, I could be the shitty author.
You don't have to be Hemingway.
So people should buy your book just to know that it doesn't take much.
It really does not take much.
Shitty writing is all about and boring.
Yeah, you could just pick a random period in history and just write a bunch of crap about it
and put a pretty stamp on the cover and just go.
It was pretty, yeah.
But I mean, like for you, right?
You don't, I don't mean you left.
I was raised by the wolves.
The wolf bots.
There's lots of standard comedians who aren't Jerry Seinfeld, right?
If you want to be a podcaster, you don't have to be Joe Rogan.
You could be someone who's got a medium audience and are enjoying it.
So like the idea that like something has to be, you have to be a massive superstar
or your failure is also ridiculous, but that's cynicism.
I mean, you can even be a failed comedian like Dave Smith.
Yeah, I don't.
This is a generic name.
I came up with this an example.
I think he has like a podcast of some kind.
He's like, yeah, not very funny.
I don't know why he would call himself a comedian, but you.
He's being ironic.
Don't you think?
Yeah, so even, even then you could do something special.
I remember what you did with me in the movie theater.
What's that?
I don't, oh, you continue.
Can you explain the jokes?
Cause I can't.
No, I'm not explaining jokes.
I'm wearing lipstick.
It's not enough.
Now I remember what you did to me in a movie theater.
And you wore lipstick that night too.
Not what I was done.
People for sure will think this, this feels like a gay porn.
Like, like a very long intro.
Cause we're not wearing pants.
Yes.
There's many reasons why this feels like this.
And the outfits and just everything about this.
How would you know?
I, my friend, I have stories.
I thought I don't have friends.
They're all suspiciously named either Lex or Lux or something.
Like you lack complete creativity.
Just like in the writing.
Or Lux, yeah.
It's, it's like you, you didn't even use like a the source for your book.
The same words over and over and over.
The sad thing about the cynicism is like, I don't think it's just a Russian thing.
I think the people.
Let me interrupt you because I didn't finish what you were saying earlier.
In America, it's not just a Russian thing.
In American culture, if you have like a sitcom or a musical, it's regarded as less legitimate
than a drama, right?
Like if something's got to be about someone's struggling or someone's suffering,
whereas this is like a joyous, happy story, like maybe something like Pixar, right?
Like sure they have conflict and they're going for something, but it's overall the
background the universe is taking in is very joyous and happy.
That is regarded artistically as less legitimate than something which is dark and the background
is despair.
And that very subtly sends a very to me pernicious message that the, you know,
that what's real is despair and happiness is the aberration.
And I think if you have that as your mindset, you're setting yourself up for maybe not failure,
but certainly not happiness.
Yeah, but that's in the figures, the ideas that the culture elevates.
But it's the local personal life of parents and teachers.
That still happens a lot in Russia and here just my whole life, especially because I'm
a weirdo.
I've been kind of told to basically be less weird.
Be, there's a kind of sense in where there's a certain path you're supposed to take in life.
And every time you have a little bit of success on those very specifically defined paths,
you're pushed to do more and more and more on those paths as opposed to celebrating the
full complexity of the weirdo that each one of us is and I certainly am.
And I just teachers, even friends and certainly family have constantly been very cynical about
my aspirations, my dreams and so on.
I think that actually created a deeply self critical engine in my brain
that I think it ultimately was productive because it was also balanced by just an internal,
maybe through genetics thing I have of optimism about the world, of just seeing the beauty in
the world.
But it is weird looking back how much people that love me were trying to bring me down.
So strange.
It's also very hurtful for me because when I graduated college, it was important for me
to be self made and not take money from my family.
And I remember my grandma, this was a huge argument, an ongoing argument.
And one time, as she was leaving my house, she slipped money in under the door and I threw
it out and it made me so angry.
Or like one year from my birthday, she gave me like $500, which was a lot of money when you're
like 22 or 23.
And I was so pissed because that told me that they didn't believe that I'd be able to feed
myself or make it on my own.
And I understand their mindset, but it's like I'm not, I wasn't, you know,
I never was never hungry.
Like maybe I couldn't, I remember I'd have to wait on the subway because I couldn't afford
a cab.
But that was a sacrifice I had to make, you know, I had to wait that half hour.
So it was a huge source and remains a source of enormous tension and contention.
And I think also, I'm sure speaking to your upbringing, in their minds, unless you're going
into an office, you can't pay the rent.
It doesn't make sense.
But there's, just like you said, forget the office, forget all that, no matter what,
there's always, whatever you accomplish in life, you always do, you're always negative
about your current position.
You always come up with another problem, just like you said.
It's always like a self-generating problem box.
Yeah, I remember I didn't speak to my dad for a few years that I'm like,
let me give this guy another chance. And in that time period, Harvey P. Carr, the author of
Subject of American Splendor, the movie and author of the series, comic books,
he and I became friends and he was writing a graphic novel about me.
And when I met with my dad, I'm like, oh, someone's writing a book about me.
And he goes, I know, so.
And it was one of those moments where I'm like, wow, you're an asshole and not the kind
of asshole I am.
You're just like not a good person. And I don't know, or really at this point, care
what the motivation or if there was no motivation with the visceral emotional reasoning for that.
But that kind of thing is something I, much later now in life, have absolutely no tolerance for.
Well, in my own private life, I try to forgive and love those people.
But it is, there've been a few in my life like this. And I think they are incredible people
if you allow yourself to see it, but they're flawed. And so I tried to forgive them.
That said, it is true that the people that are close to you, especially family,
have a disproportionate psychological effect on you.
So you have to be very careful having them in your life too much.
Like one thing is to love them and the other is to actually allow yourself to flourish.
Surround yourself with people that help you flourish. And like you said, the advice there
is really powerful, especially early on to have people that believe in you in whatever crazy,
big dreams you have that pat you on the back and say, you got this kid.
And here's the other thing. If you try and you don't make it to that Rogan level, it's okay.
Like I have several books that I've written that are on my hard drive that have not been published.
And there were a lot of work and it was really disappointing when they went out and no publishers
were interested in it. Maybe I'll publish them one day. Maybe I won't point being it's fine. I tried.
Is that a romance novel? One is one is a gay romance novel. Does that have a Santa
guy in a Santa outfit? Can you please stop asking me to send you gay pornography?
He's calling me up all hours of the night. I need more gay porn. I need some ones. I only have zeros.
Yeah. Never enough. Never enough. This one almost got a book deal. This would have been
it was 16 years ago. It was a ladlet novel. What kind of novel? Ladlet. It's like Nick Hornby.
What? Nick Hornby about a boy. So there was a little mini genre of these books about young men
trying to struggle their way through. There's a whole little series of them. Fight Club is adjacent
to that. It's not literally ladlet. I feel like you would write a great Fight Club type novel.
No. You know, Fight Club is much, Chuck Pollinick is my understanding admitted this. Fight Club
is one of the few things where the movie is better than the book. Oh, that's interesting.
But the movie is so iconic. Yeah, for sure. But still, isn't there a deeply philosophical,
it's kind of like David Foster Wallace novels? Doesn't Fight Club capture some moment in time?
That's very kind of... I was hanging out with Kurt Metzger a couple weeks ago, comedian, very
failed. Name drop. Yeah. Hey, Kurt. Watch out. And he was, he had this great story. He was hanging
out with Patrice and he had all the late comedians. Name drop. With the great comics of all time.
And Patrice goes, Kurt was talking about how much you liked the book or the movie Fight Club. And
Patrice is like, that is the whitest book on Earth. He goes, your problem in life is you don't
have enough violence. Your problem in life, you need someone to beat you up. That's not a problem
for me. Yeah, well, I mean, but still, it is a very white book, but it still captures a kind
of anger and an angst and a certain subculture in society. That's really powerful. That probably
led to, in some part, to the thing you wrote about in the New Right. Oh, for sure. I mean,
it was this kind of like, there's that line in the movie where Edward Norton says, I'm a 30-year-old
boy. This kind of question of what is it, sorry to be Matt Walsh, but what does it mean to be a
man? What is masculinity mean? Why are so many men at such a young age feeling so lost? This idea
that if I fill my house with nice furniture, that's still not going to be fulfilling to anyone.
Matt Walsh is... He's from the Daily Wire. He just did a documentary called What is a Woman.
Can you explain? I don't know who he is. So Matt Walsh is someone who works for the Daily Wire.
Yes. And he just recently did a documentary called What is a Woman? I think it was called.
And he went out to lots of people working in gender theory and all that thing. And he asked
them to define... He went to the Maasai in Africa, the tribe, and to talk to people about transgenderism,
non-binary, which is a word I know you hate. And the documentary was surprisingly well done.
Is that like a passive-aggressive compliment? Surprisingly well done.
Well, because Matt is very aggressive on Twitter. We follow each other. And there was a lot of
opportunities in this film for him to really be like... And instead, to his credit, he let the
people speak. And it's possible it was edited a certain way. Of course, it was obviously edited.
But when he just asked them, can you just define a woman for me in playing dumb?
We're not playing dumb. Just saying, what's your opinion? A lot of the people he was speaking to
were getting extremely agitated. So it worked in that kind of context as well. It was not his
usual style. Speaking of which, do you ever regret your behavior on Twitter?
There were a couple of times, but very rarely. Can you describe the big strategy before we
dive back into the October Revolution? My strategy... Do you have a strategy or is it...
Does it come from the heart? Or does it come from the brain? It comes from I want to have fun.
So that's literally what it comes down to. It's like... The roles just want to have fun.
Are you drunk? What is it? What is in there?
I'm very cheeky. I have the holiday spirit, even though it's not the holidays.
Oh, that's egg noggin there. Delirious. I did not sleep much last night,
I've been... I think the second time we talked or the third time, the second time,
I stayed up almost all night. Oh, I know. I keep track of when you come and go.
Yeah. So my door camera points at your garage, so I know when you're leaving or coming home.
My camera points at your bedroom from the inside, but I shouldn't have told you that now.
Let me ask you this, because this something's been bothering me. There was a chair that you
threw out and I was looking at my camera and I'm like, let me see when he threw this out.
And then one time you went to the garbage and you adjusted it to make it stick out of the
garbage even more. What were you doing there? Oh, to make sure that people know there's
a chair in there. Is that really what you do? Well, like the garbage person,
so they know it's a chair, so they don't get... I always think I don't want them to get like
hurt or whatever. Oh, okay. Like they open the thing, it's like, a chair. I don't know what
I was thinking. Okay, it was really odd. I didn't know how to get rid of a chair, it was broken.
It was like cracked and it was a problem. So Twitter for me, my point is to have fun.
It's also fun to kind of smack down people who I regard as bad actors and also kind of to promote
news that I find interesting that maybe isn't as prominently part of the culture as it might
otherwise be. Do you think sometimes you draw too broadly the category of people that are bad actors
and thereby sort of adding to the mockery and the cynicism in the world?
I don't think mockery and cynicism are at all synonymous. I think cynicism means everyone
sucks. I don't think everyone sucks. I think it is undeniable that a lot of people suck.
What if I told you most people don't suck? Could you steal man the case that most people
don't suck? Sure. I can do it in a cynical way, honestly. It's quasi-cynical way.
I think most people are neither here nor there. Most people just kind of go with the flow.
They're amiable. Human beings are social creatures. They want to get along. They don't
want to cause problems. They don't have the capacity to be the target of a problem.
If most people sucked, then going anywhere would be excruciating ordeal.
The airport's annoying, but if most people sucked, it would really be annoying. Going
to the supermarket would be really annoying. I don't think most people suck,
but I do think that in public discourse, there are lots of people who are dishonest about
their agenda. For example, if I could be someone who has promoting a certain ideology,
but I'm in the payroll of a candidate, or my think tank needs this to happen,
or I'm being paid for something like that. That sort of thing I think happens all the time.
There's the line I have in the book, Upton Sinclair. I forgot how he word exactly,
but it's very hard to convince someone of something if his payroll depends on him not
being convinced of it. The thing I'm really excited about with what Elon's doing with Twitter,
and I'm just ecstatic about this, is to have the context now. You'll have a politician making a
claim and they're going to word it in certain ways. My favorite example is when people are like,
if you look at the years 2002 to 2020, terrorism in America, it's like,
did anything happen in 2001? Is there a reason you just coincidentally started in 2002? Things
like that. When people are manipulating things to force an outcome that they want and to promote
an idea that they want disingenuously, to have that underneath that in Twitter now,
where the audience provides context, I think is something extremely useful. It's a great
way to nip propaganda in the bud. Propaganda pervades the entire political spectrum, of course.
The interesting thing about Twitter is also the discussion about free speech and so on.
I think it's interesting to discuss free speech and the freedom of the press from the context of
the Soviet Union. Sure. Let's return to the October Revolution at Lenin.
What was the October Revolution? Who was Lenin? What are some interesting aspects of this
human being and also this moment in history that stand out to you that are important to
understand? I think the interesting thing about Lenin is he was a zealot and he was a visionary
and he really kind of meant it. I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but Lenin also was someone
who was strategic. At a certain point when they were trying to advance communism throughout the
Soviet Union and the costs were outweighing the benefits, he did a strategic retreat.
He did the new economic policy. You had a rise of kind of these small capitalists coming back.
You could hire people again. For the hardcore people in the Soviet Union, hardcore communists,
this was a huge betrayal. It's a step back. He didn't do it because he was some kind of
crypto capitalist. He did it because he's like, all right, we know where we got to get to,
but we have to go at a certain pace and we have to adjust as we go along. To have someone who is
that much of an ideologue and that much of a visionary, but still to have any element of
pragmatism to him is, I think, a very rare combination.
And that pragmatism, do you think that's ultimately where things go wrong?
That's where you sacrifice the ideas. Pragmatism in this case was good because
by taking a step back, he kind of gave himself some breathing room
to allow the revolution to continue to win the civil war.
There was a big moment where Germany, there's lots of funny anecdotes that I learned while
researching this book. So Germany and Russia, they were negotiating a ceasefire because Germany
wanted Russia out of the war. And basically, Germany was like, all right, we'll let you leave,
but you have to sign this treaty and basically hand over all this land that we're currently
occupying. It was just parts of Ukraine, parts of Poland. And Lenin tells Trotsky to stall.
He's just run the clock because he was of the belief that now that they've taken power in Russia,
you're going to have a worldwide war because of revolutions. So he's like, just stall them.
And he stalled, he stalled. And at a certain point, Germany's like, all right, you're signing
this tomorrow or we're invading. And Trotsky basically said, yeah, so we're leaving the war,
but we're not signing anything. And the Germans are like, what? And he's like, yeah, well,
that's what we're doing. So, hey. And basically, eventually he had to sign the treaty and cede
huge parts to land and a lot of money. And this was a very precarious moment for him to maintain
control of Russia. And people were telling him like, you've lost huge amounts of territory.
You know, you've blown it. You should be in jail. And he's like, watch your mouth.
Because if you look for the future, it'll be clear which one of us is more likely to be the one
ending up in jail. And he was absolutely right. This was Trotsky or Lenin saying?
This is Lenin saying this to Karl Radick. So who are these figures here? Who's Trotsky? Who's Lenin?
Who's Stalin? What are some interesting aspects of all of this? Would it sort of just to linger on it,
the personalities, the ideas that were important? Well, Trotsky came late to Bolshevism. He was
really the brains in many ways of the October Revolution. He was an amazing strategist.
He never forgot that he was an amazing strategist, had a very high opinion of himself.
And by the way, the October Revolution in 1917, that's like a key moment.
Of course, the Russian Revolution lasted a long time, but this was a key moment
of what? A phase shift towards success of the Bolsheviks?
Well, that was the moment. That was like, all right, we are the government now. And now we have to
make it, you know, like Thomas Jefferson said, I think it was Thomas Jefferson, or no, it's been
Franklin, a republic, if you can keep it. It's like, all right, we've made our own kind of government
if we can keep it, because that was the big question. You had an international blockade,
you had the white armies, the czarist forces who wanted to restore czarism, or at least the parliament
from right before Lenin took over. So this was a big kind of, no one's was, you know, in some ways,
it was like the 2016 election. It's like, all right, we vote in Trump. Well, what's this going
to look like? Like no one had any idea of what a Trump presidency was going to look like. All we
knew was this guy's on Twitter, running his mouth, he's insulting people, and he's had all these views
somewhere over here, somewhere over there. And the funny thing is the Russians hacked both elections.
That's true. It was Putin and the gremlin. So Trotsky was, you know, Lenin's right-hand man.
And he was, you know, enormous. And to this day, he remains this kind of figure who is supposedly
a less authoritarian, anti-Stalinist version of communism that people can endorse. And Stalin,
of course, was Lenin's successor. At first, there was a triumvirate running Russia as Lenin was
recuperating from strokes, then very quickly, not very quickly, but gradually and then suddenly Stalin
became an absolute dictator and he had a series of purges and so on and so forth,
which solidified his control over the country. And of course, for Stalin, Trotsky later, but
throughout, as you write, seemed to almost take on a supernatural character when everything that
went wrong in the USSR was due not just to his views, but to his direct orders from abroad. And
of course, George Orwell brilliantly, and probably my favorite book of his, which is Animal Farm,
and also in 1984, portray Trotsky as a snowball in Animal Farm and Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984,
is this embodiment of this evil that will always have to be fighting. And you need that in order to
hold on to power. You always have to have that enemy.
Right. So that, I mean, that's something I talk about in the White Pill as well.
When things start going wrong, they always have to have scapegoats, right? And there's this Russian
enigdot, you know, what the Russians like to do is you can't say things out loud. But if you make
jokes, you can say unspeakable truths. And there's this one enigdot where there's a Russian leader
and things are going bad. And he looks in his drawer and there were two letters from his predecessor.
And he opens the first letter in a panic. And the letter says, you know, for advice, and the
letter says, blame everything on me. So he goes out there and he's like, oh, my predecessor sucked,
he was terrible, blah, blah, it's his fault. And everyone's like, okay. And then there's a calamity
again. And he's like a crap. So he goes back to his desk and he reads the second one. And it says,
sit down and write two letters. So when things start going wrong, as they constantly did throughout
the history of the Soviet Union, or any, you know, totalitarian authoritarian country,
it's someone has to be the blame. Since we know that our ideology is true, and scientifically
true, if it's not working in reality, given the perfection of the ideology, someone must be intentionally
undermining it and causing the disconnect between thought and reality. And in the Soviet Union,
there was the kulaks at one point, then it was the wreckers, the doctors, it was just different,
the cap, there was always someone and Trotsky was called a fascist and was accused of plotting with
Hitler and all this other stuff. And you also write the problem with communism is that eventually
you run out of possible scape boats, scape boats, scape boats, you run out of boats.
You do run out of boats. Who's going to carry them?
Eventually you run out of possible scape boats. It's my second language,
this English thing. I'm a failed podcaster, I'm a failure. Eventually you run out of
possible scape goats for failure, at which point acknowledging or even noticing that
something was wrong itself becomes a form of treason.
Yeah. So I saw that in North Korea. Wherever you went in North Korea, something was wrong.
So if you have four buttons for the elevator, one where you mismatched, every wall had a crack,
every floor had a stain, the bathroom would be rusted through when you want to flush the urinal.
But if you are someone who points this out, you're a troublemaker and you're saying something's
wrong, you're criticizing the operation. First of all, you're threatening the person who's in
charge because now they're incompetent and now that's a big red flag for them.
But second, if you're just going around saying this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong,
even if it's objectively true, you're a troublemaker and you're counter-revolutionary.
So at a certain point, everyone just has to put on blinders and pretend that everything is fine.
One example I use in the book, an extreme example, was there was a photography professor
and he pointed out to his class and he was an older man that before the revolution,
the quality of photographic paper was better and he was, I think, executed for this heresy.
So yeah, you have to pretend there was, I'm reading a book right now about the Chinese
cultural revolution and there was an academic, I forget his name, Huxi, I think,
and he points out that in these countries, not only do you not have freedom of speech,
you don't have freedom of silence. You can't just sit there quietly. You have to say how great
things are and how much you're enjoying and how wonderful they are instead of just keeping quiet
because if you keep quiet, that's suspicious. They're always singing those songs about how happy
they are and how great everything is and if everyone else is singing, who are you to not sing?
Yeah, those pictures, especially when Stalin giving speeches and everyone is applauding
any dictator and you don't want to be the first person that stops applauding.
Stalin had to have a button, is my understanding, at a certain point to tell people to stop applauding
because like you said, if you're the first one to stop clapping, people are going to notice
and why'd you stop clapping? You don't like Stalin?
But just imagine being one of those people clapping.
That's the thing. They always had a sword over their head but they all had a lot of blood in
their hands too. It's a very, very precarious life.
1984 does a good job of this. What is that? Two minutes of hate or something like this?
You lose yourself in the hysteria of it. There's some level of which at first
you're sacrificing your basic individualistic ability to think but then you get lost in this
kind of wave of emotion and you give into it. It's like a mix of fear and then anger
and then you direct that anger towards like snowball or Trotsky or whoever.
What is that? You're also losing yourself in the crowd because you're like, it's not just
I'm angry. Everyone I know, we're all angry together so you really are becoming a part of
something bigger than yourself and having this kind of communal, very primal, emotional experience.
It's like the opposite of Christmas. We're all together. Everyone's sharing their joy.
Everyone's sharing their love. This is literally the opposite. Everyone's together sharing their
hate and anger and rage but you're all kind of having a mind meld.
But I wonder what it's like to be an independent thinker in those moments. Allow yourself to
think. We know because there were a lot of them and they were all punished enormously.
They can be noticed. You can notice them. Oh yeah. You even noticed it in America.
America's a free country but when people start asking too many questions it's like,
where are you going with this? If you're in an office even in a corporate setting,
you're a troublemaker. You're making problems for everyone. Why can't you be normal?
Why can't you be just like everybody else? People do not like having to be made to think
and they certainly despise having to be made to justify themselves because that's a threat to
their status and to their power and this applies into totalitarianism or applies to
Dunder Mifflin. I still can't believe you're wearing lipstick. I'm not.
Goes to show you can pull lipstick on a pig. It's like a snowball.
I think you've just been on a bender. It's been rough. It's been rough. It's been rough.
I feel like I can be myself in this outfit. I honestly feel like I could just go around
in this outfit and just be weird because everyone will accept you if you're wearing a Santa outfit.
You can say anything in a Santa outfit, right? Have you seen Bad Santa?
Yeah, Bad Santa. Exactly. You can't say anything. My fuck stick?
How did Stalin come to power? If we return back to those early days,
post the October Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin, how did he come to power?
What Stalin did very cleverly, Stalin was, he worked the system. He was very much in the
background and what he did better than Trotsky is he was much more a politician. He was a glad
hander. He made friends within the party. He made people feel respected and appreciated.
And Lenin trusted him. After Lenin's stroke, Stalin was basically the one who was keeping
track of him. Lenin asked Stalin at one point to kill him because after the strokes he was
incapacitated, Stalin talked him out of it. But at the same time, Lenin was like,
if I need someone killed, this is who I need to talk to. Stalin, if you look at photos of him
when he was young, he was a stud. He was a gangster. He was a bank robber. And he basically
worked the system and you had the Trotskyites on one hand who were much more to the left.
Stalin's big, I would call it a heresy, was he put forth the idea of socialism in one country,
whereas we're just going to make it work here in what became the Soviet Union. The Trotsky idea,
and this is really kind of the Marxist idea, is that the Workers' Revolution has to be worldwide.
This is just a worldwide kind of new era of humanity where Stalin's like, no, no,
we're just going to make it here and then later behind what became the Iron Curtain.
But this was, sure, this was an ideological division between the two. But what happens in
totalitarian countries, it happens in any kind of like, you know, when you have intermingling
of like religion and government, things that are like ideological disputes, like the Aryan
heresy. The Aryan heresy in Christianity is that Christ is subordinate to God the Father, right?
Whereas the contemporary Orthodox version, it's three gods, one God and three person, excuse me,
so they're all co-equal aspects of God in heaven. But that was an excuse to be like,
you guys are evil, you're on the side of the devil, we're going to kill you. So these little
disputes about ideas are often a convenient cover for people to have a power struggle
in the guise of being like, it's not that I'm about wanting to be more powerful, I'm just on the
side of the truth and you're speaking lies and that's dangerous to the revolution or to the true
faith. So he squeezed, but the thing is Trotsky had the seeds of his own defeat because per Trotsky,
the party is always right. You cannot be right against the party, right? So if you have this
kind of party structure and the party is saying you're wrong as an individual, you are wrong
because the collective is what makes decisions. The collective, the workers are who have the
knowledge and the information and it is important for you to kind of subordinate your selfishness,
your individualism to this greater good. So he kind of set himself up in many ways.
Is it clear to you why Trotsky lost that power struggle? You just explained that he set himself
up, but you can see how different ideologies can be used to achieve different ends.
Is there another alternative possible trajectory where Trotsky could have been
the head of the Soviet Union? It would be very hard because he was Jewish. So when they were
seizing power, Trotsky explicitly said, I can't be in charge of Jewish. So the Soviet Union remained
extremely anti-Semitic. One of the reasons so many Jews became communists in the Soviet Union,
because the promise was once the communists took over, we're not going to have programs anymore.
For example, you had these Jewish ghettos and under the permission or encouragement of the Tsar,
just gangs of people go through killing, raping, robbing, stealing, riding for days and just
a clean massacre. The idea is like, under communism, everyone's going to be equal. We're not going to
have this anymore. They still had it, but to a lesser extent. But since Trotsky was Jewish,
his real name is Lev Bronstein, it was almost impossible to have a scenario where he was going
to be in charge. Stalin fed into that to some extent. Also, this idea of Jewish internationalism,
it's like, okay, he doesn't really have loyalty to Russia. Many of the people who were Jewish,
who were high up in Stalin's government administration, they very much had to prove
their loyalty to communism as opposed to Judaism. Throughout the 20th century, what was the
relationship between communism and Jews in the Soviet Union? In terms of anti-Semitism,
the ups and downs of anti-Semitism, it seems like it was lesser and greater in different parts
of the 20th century. Well, it's the kind of thing where if something was bad, there's this Russian
rhyme, like, if there's no water in the sink who drank it, all the Jews. So if something goes wrong,
there's just a convenient historical scapegoat. It's the Jews fault. So this is something that
towards the end of his life very much, and this was after World War II, Stalin was getting ready
for another kind of series of programs. All these Jews were getting kicked out of their jobs.
Jewish doctors were getting sent to the Far East instead of being in cities. The newspapers started
talking about rootless cosmopolitans, which was a term the Nazis also used to kind of regard Jews
as others or as aliens. And they were very clever about it. In Pravda, they would, and I talked
about this in the White Pill, in Pravda, there were articles and letters to the editor, they were
like, you know, things are getting so anti-Semitic, we really should round up all the Jews and send
them elsewhere for their own safety. So they were kind of setting the ground rules or the basis
to have this sort of program come back, but a spoiler alert, Stalin dies. And immediately,
all of this gets reversed and the new administration rehabilitates the doctors who were accused of
trying to hurt him and all this other sort of thing. What is it about the scapegoat in society?
Are we always going to be looking for scapegoats? What do you learn from human nature that this
seems to keep happening? I think there's a book called The Nurture Assumption,
and I discussed this in the new right. And what the author learned is that humans define
themselves by opposition. So if you have a group of people and it's kids and adults,
the kids will see themselves as kids because we're as opposed to adults. If the adults leave,
the kids see themselves as boys and girls because I'm not a girl, I'm a boy, I'm not a boy, I'm a
girl. So they divide. So this idea, which is a very lefty idea, that human beings naturally
all get along is not accurate. And the best example of this is look after 9-11, look where there's a
war. Nothing unites a popular, it's not like when times are thriving that everyone's all working
together. When things are bad and there's an enemy, the Japanese are Pearl Harbor, it's al-Qaeda,
that's when everyone really comes together because now we have someone to be against.
Someone has to be the outgroup and we have to be the ingroup as opposed to them.
But there's a viciousness to the actions you take towards the outgroup that varies
throughout history. The degree of viciousness can cross the line towards atrocities, towards
genocide. And that's the question of why does it sometimes do that? Why does it sometimes
cross into genocide? I understand it's a useful thing to have the other to blame in this world,
especially when times are rough. But why does that sometimes lead to sort of action that says,
I'm going to murder, I'm going to torture the other? I think the question really is why sometimes
it doesn't. And one of the things I learned when I was doing the New Right is a lot of the
Nazis, you use that term loosely speaking, you're Nazis, they make the point that like, oh,
when the Holocaust happened, it really wasn't that big of a deal and that only became a big
deal in the decades later. And this just shows the power of Jewish influence. And I'm like,
this to me is a great thing. It's a great thing that we sat down pretty recently historically.
And we're like, wait a minute, guys, when we have a war, or we have conquest, you don't have to just
start killing everyone. Like this is something that's bad and wrong. And certainly in the last
60 years, 70 years, this is something that people have come to take for granted. But that wasn't
the case before. It would always be, or not always, but often, if you conquer, you just go wild and
just start slaughtering masses of people. It's, who's the guy from Harvard? And he, Steven Pinker,
Steven Pinker, I'm sorry, I forgot his name. So he just talks about like, you know, we know,
this is one of the reasons also why there was so much skepticism when the Holocaust started,
because this was regarded as something that was barbaric. This is from the Middle Ages,
from the biblical times. We don't do this anymore. We're civilized now. So genocide is historically
the norm. I think it's also harder to pull it off emotionally when you have the visuals, and when
you have the audio, and when you have the voices of the people being slaughtered. We don't know,
you know, if this was 2000 years ago, and people, you know, in the Bible, they go kill this group,
go kill that group, we don't have their names, we don't have the visuals, we don't have anything.
But when you see someone being like, you know, there's a book about, I think, the Rwandan genocide,
and the title is, we regret to inform you that tomorrow we will be executed with all of our
families like a telegram. And like, when you get a telegram like this, it's very different than
reading some history book about, you know, the Assyrians killed the Phoenicians. It's like,
I don't know who this is, I don't know who that is, right? So I think this is something that has
changed very recently. There was this kind of interesting moment just that speaks to the way
technology has liberated people from violence. Kristallnacht, which was a moment in the lead
up to the Holocaust, were basically, you know, with Hitler's blessing, you had a nationwide
burning of Jewish businesses, synagogues burnt down, and Kaiser Wilhelm, you know, the Kaiser,
he said, for the first time in my life, embarrassed to be a German. But that was a moment where
worldwide, even plenty of people who did not think very highly of Jewish people were like,
this is a wrap. This is a complete nightmare. But 200 years ago, 100 years ago,
maybe not literally a Kristallnacht, but there's an outgroup, and we hate them, and we're going
to kill them, and it's fine. And you think it's even more difficult now with the internet?
Yes, that kind of thing. Now, more difficult doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or it can't
happen. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying we know a lot about what's going on in North
Korea, you know, probably the most secretive country on earth. There's a lot of atrocities in
Eritrea, which is kind of known. So I think it's also, like, if you think about it, if you're,
how many years ago, 300 years ago, you only know the people in your village, and they're all probably
going to look like you, so on and so forth. Whereas now, if I'm on social media, and there's someone
from any country, and maybe their picture looks a little different, they use the same anime picture,
somebody else, but they're putting forth their ideas, you do see the humanity in them, and you do
see a sense of familiarity and a familial bond with them. And when you hear about these things,
you know, when I, again, like I did when I did Dear Reader, no one, and I was on Al Qaeda,
and I was on Alex Jones, no one pushed back about like, oh, the North Koreans, they were all like,
this is horrible. If I had a magic wand, I'd give them food, I wouldn't have them live in fear.
And this is something that I don't think was the case a couple of hundred years ago.
As I said, I'd love to get your thoughts about what's going on in Iran, the protests. It seems
like the regime there is able to crack down with violence. My thoughts about Iran, let me just,
there's something else about Iran which I think is interesting, this whole idea of care for what
you wish for. Because people have this site, and something I kind of, one of the reasons I have the
white pill is Americans really are very naive about the nature of evil, right? They really think
that a dictator has a weird mustache and he's banging the table and he's, you know, like a crazy
person. And it's often not the case, but they also think if something is bad, therefore the
alternative is going to be better. So you had the Shah of Iran, and he was kind of authoritarian,
and no, he's not a good guy. So in 1979, there were a lot of people like, this guy's horrible,
he's oppressed in the Iranian people, let's get him the F out of there. He's so bad
that whatever comes after it has to be an improvement. And it's like, no, that's, if you
think, I mean, this drives me crazy when conservatives are like, Joe Biden's the worst
president we ever had, like this is destroying America. I'm like, you have no idea how bad
things can get. The fact that you are in a position to complain means we got a ways to go.
Yeah, every time you say that Donald Trump or Joe Biden is the worst president ever,
that warms my heart. Because you're allowed to say that.
Yes, yeah. It's like, I just let it, it's like music, because you're allowed to be pretty,
in response to a president's tweet, you couldn't write that.
Yeah, yeah.
And it still lives there, and it's, and nobody arrests you.
Yeah.
Which is a rare thing in human history.
Yes.
And still rare thing in the world. I mean, it does seem that Iran, the current regime is able
to crack down on communication channels. It's still, it's surprising to me how much power
government can have. Like they could use violence to control the population.
Right.
And nobody's going to do anything about it.
Well, the rest of the world just watches.
But here's the thing, right? Because if the rest of the world starts doing too much,
then they have a justification to crack down even more. This regime, this
protests are not legitimate. These are, this happened constantly in the Soviet Union. These
are foreign provocateurs. This is meddling in our country, curfew, lockdown, mandatory searches,
everyone's a spy. So that narrative is a very convenient one for people who are authoritarian.
I know a lot of people who are Persian, as I'm sure you do as well, very hardworking,
very bright, great people. And all you could do is hope for a peaceful liberalization of,
here's the, people don't realize how liberal Iran used to be. Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol used
to be friends with the Shah. And if you read his diaries, he talks about how he knew things
weren't going well for the Shah because they had less caviar at the table. But like this is,
he was really kind of, there's, I think, a fore-understanding in America. And I'm not sure
why of what these liberal Muslim countries are like. I gave a talk in Bodrum in Turkey,
which is like a resort town in Turkey. And I had thought previous to that, or I had suspected,
if push comes to shove and they have to choose people in Turkey between the West
and like Al-Qaeda, not Al-Qaeda, but like, you know, hardcore Islam, they're going to choose
hardcore Islam. You go there and you're like, oh, this is like Los Angeles. Like these people are
so liberal, so, and they're the first to be killed. They're the first targets. So that,
people like that in Iran are who my thoughts are. And with the, I got to tell you, like,
nothing makes me more of a feminist than seeing the women in countries like this fight for
the right to education, the right to dress as they please. Maybe we don't need them driving,
but, you know, that's okay. There he is with that characteristic brilliant humor
that you're so loved for and should probably be banned for on Twitter. I'm doing my best. Every
time you tweet, I just report, report, report. Please stop this man. You don't have like a script
to just- Exactly. Well, funny enough, I do. But I don't abuse my power. I wear the ring like Frodo
and I respect the power. But you look like Gollum. That's not what your mom said last night.
She said you're hung like Gollum.
I'm not going down that road with you. I'm not holding hands one, another time. I learned my
way. Fool me once. Okay. My close childhood friend is from Iran. Oh, wow. Okay. And
I talked to him a lot. I wanted to go to Iran. But it's so far away. I can see it from my house,
my friend. I'd love to take that trip even now. It's just culturally, so all the different little
pockets of local cultures that make up Iran. I just heard so many amazing things. Yeah,
my friend Paul went there. He had an amazing time. He just absolutely loved it. He thought the people
were awesome. It was so interesting, very developed. Just like Tehran is- I mean, this is the history
and Tehran is insane. Yeah. I would really love to visit. Now we return back. I don't know how we
ended up in Iran, but let us stroll back to Stalin taking power. What role did the suppression
of speech, the censorship, the suppression of the freedom of the press have in Stalin
taking hold, taking power? In Lenin, in Trotsky, in Stalin having power. Well, it was a very useful
mechanism to direct public opinion and inform public perspectives and everything. First of all,
there was a lot of news about how great things were. You have a bumper crop here, grains never
been better. There's another anecdote where President Kalinin is talking about how on Carl
Mark Street in Kharkiv, there's all sorts of new skyscrapers being built and it's just absolutely
amazing. Some of the audience gets up and goes, comrade, I work on Carl Mark Street. I walk
there every day. There's none of these skyscrapers. It goes, see, that's your problem. You're trusting
your eyes instead of reading something and learning what's in the papers. There was this
kind of disconnect between- I forget. You probably know the joke, like pravda-nipravda
is veste-nisveste, like pravda means truth, but there's no truth to be had in pravda. It's
kind of the Russian line. The point is it very much- and the other thing, this is- my mom wasn't
particularly politically motivated, but she talked about how you didn't have to be smart
to realize how dishonest it was because one day someone is the great hero of the Soviet people
and the next week he's been a traitor and a class enemy and the worst and then sometimes
they reverted and it's like, okay, they couldn't even keep their stories straight. In fact,
at a certain point when Gorbachev liberalized, they had to cancel tests because the history
books had to be rewritten so quickly. The thing also with these newspapers is there was a lot of-
it was very monotonous because you had the same message over and over. A lot of these
papers were about kind of speaking to the lowest common denominator, Stalin's great, everything's
great, overseas bad, so it very much was about not informing but creating a certain perspective
in the public at large. Also, you were educated as a citizen on what you're supposed to think and
say. A lot of this was this kind of private truth public lies situation, so you could
read the paper at your factory, you could be like, oh my god, this guy Karl Radek's great.
He's like, oh my god, yeah, he's amazing. You knew what to talk about and you knew how to
look at it as well and then when you get home, you could just kind of be more honest with family.
But the question is, to which degree does this propaganda and this ideology infiltrate your
actual thinking? You give examples of this like scientists in infiltrated science.
Oh, yeah. So basically, Lysenko is the textbook example, Lysenkoism and biology.
So because Marxism is materialist, they didn't like the idea that genes pass on
from one generation to the next. So Lysenkoism kind of was a rejection of Mendel and that kind of
genetics. And if you reject genes, you're really going in a bad direction in terms of biology.
The Soviet Union's biological program became an international laughing stock. At one point,
Lysenko claimed he crossed a tomato and a potato. You had things where they said they
had nuclear, wait, we have fission, but they said they invented fusion or heavy water or
hard water or whatever it was. Point being, in cultures like this, your way to achieve status
wasn't necessarily about your accomplishments, but about your loyalty to orthodoxy.
So if you were saying things that got to a result that was congruent with the broader
ideology as a whole, that was much better as a means of furthering yourself in the arts or in
the sciences than if you had something that was innovative. Because if you're innovative,
it's like, well, how do I fit this in with the broader ruling ideology? The problem
with totalitarianism, one of the many problems is everything, literally everything has to be
perceived through the lens of ideology. There were scientists who were arrested or at least fired
because of their theories about sunspot developments because it was regardless on Marxist.
There was an epidemic and all these horses got sick. And because the vaccine didn't work on the
horses, the bacteriologists were arrested because they were regardless records. It's like, we gave
you a job, you didn't do it, you're undermining the social estate. So it's a backward series of
incentives and it's designed to maintain at all costs the ruling ideological superstructure.
But you draw a small distinction between the ideology and the ideological superstructure
and the propaganda. Aren't those intermixed together?
Well, the ideological is in the sciences and what's true in genetics or what's true in astronomy.
That doesn't really percolate out to the masses, right? So the pravda is not is maybe covering
this scientist is great or these discoveries are great, but it's not necessarily the same as day
to day or glorifying political leaders. But the pravda is a manifestation of the idea that
truth can be conjured up. Yes, you can be constructed and it can be altered quickly.
And then I just, I wonder, sort of 1984 caricatures that I wanted to a degree
it really could control the way you think that like how many people it affected.
I can give you an example, a very easy one. So again, with regard to North Korea, Kim,
the great leader Kim Il-sung, who was the founder of North Korea had a tumor on the back of his neck.
And it was too close to the skull, the spinal column, so they couldn't operate on it. And
throughout his life, it got bigger and bigger. And I got mixed messages in my research about
whether North Koreans knew about it because they was photographed him from this angle.
And I met a refugee. And I asked him, like, did you know that he had this tumor? She goes,
yeah, yeah, when people played him in the movies, they would, you know, you'd make up there. And
she goes, it was an old war injury. And I go, why would a war injury get bigger throughout your life?
And she just stood there. And she was like, holy, but she never questioned it. But it was the kind
of thing where they put the idea in her head. And since there's no reason to question it,
she just kind of went with it her entire life until I talked to her, Audrey, his name.
Hi, Audrey. Hi, Audrey. I wonder what percent of the population is like that.
Here's the thing. If there's a cost to me questioning, Lysenko is a great scientist,
and there's no benefit. Why wouldn't I just go with what's going to keep me, my family safe?
But I also mean just the psychological. There might be a very local psychological cost. So
not a cost you're going to jail, but a cost like you're going to kind of ruin the conversation
by bringing it up. Kind of like, yeah, I don't, I'm just trying to, it's like Debbie Downer,
right? Yeah. Yeah. But there's also the whole metaphor of like, there's two fish in the river,
one says, man, the water's really great today, and the other one goes, what's water? Yeah.
Like a friend of mine, Adriana, her mom came to the west, and they went to supermarket,
and the mom just in front of all the Fanta. So it's just crying. She's like, what's going on?
She goes, they told us we had more food than you. And when something is, you can, it's,
you can underthink this story. This guy's an enemy of the people. He was the hero.
He just offended someone. This is bullshit. It's almost impossible psychologically to think
I'm living in the Truman Show and that everything in the media is not just wrong,
but a carefully constructed narrative and a lie. Like what they're never going to tell the truth,
that how you, you know, like what? Like you, and even if that, even if you do understand that,
how would you even read between the lines to deduce what the truth is?
Yeah. It must have been a strange experience. The stories of soldiers, the Red Army soldiers
throughout World War II, as they go to different countries, even Romania, but in Europe,
to just to understand that people live much better than they did, than the soldiers did
back in the Soviet Union. And that's why a lot of times when they went back, Stalin had them killed
because they saw too much or sent to the camps. So just to linger on this idea of free speech.
So there's constant discussion about free speech and this modern debate about social media and
all that kind of stuff. What's your take on it? Grounding it not in some kind of shallow discussion
of free speech we have today, but more in the context of Pravda and the suppression of speech
in Stalinist Russia. I hate the term free speech because it's used in many different
contexts. Some I agree with entirely, some I disagree with at all. I don't think everyone
has something to say or something after the conversation. And I have my local community
and it used to be, I think the boilerplate language is come support free speech and free
discourse and I changed that because I don't like that term because people will tell you
you with some reason that, oh, if you block me on Twitter, you're voiding my free speech.
It's like, I don't like that term as a whole. But one of the points of the white pill and
something I see enormous parallels with today, if you have one news outlet or three news outlets
with identical ideology, you're not going to be able to get to any kind of truth or any kind of
useful information. It's all going to be pre-filtered for you. It's like a baby bird and you're eating
the mother birds vomit, right? But if you have what we have increasing now with technology,
if you have a world where everyone has a camera on their phone, if you have a world
where anyone can put their ideas out there, maybe they're banned from certain outlets,
but they're not literally vanished like they were in the USSR, that is very healthy. That is
something I'm enormously supportive of because back in the day, if you only had the TV crews with
cameras, you can only see what they're capturing and they could edit it. Whereas now, we saw this
recently during COVID, right? You had these reporters with masks on and they're talking,
but the cameraman wasn't wearing a mask. So you'd have the people on the street being like,
look, they don't believe it. Or as soon as they would start filming, the guy took the mask off
and they'd film them. They go, you are lying. You're putting this on for some purpose,
whether you're leaving the efficacy of masks or not, that person clearly does not. It's only
putting on for show. So that's or crimes. People are anti-police. They say, okay,
the cop said this, did he draw the gun and this guy necessarily so on and so forth.
It is so much better when everyone has access to as much of the information as possible
and can make that informed decision themselves. Now, there certainly is space for informed people
to be like, no, no, no, no, this isn't what it looks like. If you look here, if you look there,
it's crapped here so on and so forth. But that's still much more useful than just having that
20-second clip that someone has decided to edit for you.
So like truth has a way of, because it's everything is so interconnected,
truth no matter what has a way of finding its way to the populace.
And also, there's a big asymmetry in terms of trust. So if I tell you 100 truths and one lie,
that lie is equal. I'm screwed because once you catch me in a like, you don't have to kill
someone every day to be a murderer, right? You don't have to do it once. So if you catch me
in a brazen lie, you're going to look at everything I say after that with an enormous grain of salt.
So that is another big asymmetry in favor of truth. If someone trusts you,
you have to be honest all the time and you're going to make mistakes,
you can own those mistakes. Be like, hey, this is why I made the mistake. This is why I said
such and such. Okay. But the flip side of that, which has been disheartening to me,
is that people on the conspiracy side, conspiracy theory side of things,
I've noticed how easy it is to just call something a lie.
Yes. And then that becomes viral. For some reason, there's a desire for people,
yeah, for anyone who points out that the emperor is not wearing a clothes, even when the emperor is
fully clothed. So I don't know what that is, but that really seems to mess with this truth mechanism.
So when, when it becomes viral to call people a liar, whether they're a liar or not,
it's like, you feel like on unstable ground. Because to me, that idea of revealing
a lie that somebody told is a really powerful mechanism to keep people honest.
But when you're like misusing it, crying wolf too much, well, it seems,
it seems to break the system makes me nervous because there's also like,
but just if someone is a liar, that doesn't mean literally everything they say is a lie.
No, but what is a lie and what isn't, I just noticed that there's money to be made
in calling out something as a lie. It's just the conspiracy theories straight up.
The first thing, some traumatic event happened, given explanation, that's not the mainstream
explanation. No matter what, whether it's true or lie, there's a lot of virality and money to be
made in that. And that makes me nervous because it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It becomes
anti-establishment ideas are viral, whether they're true or not.
Sure. But I think establishment ideas are powerful whether they're true or not.
So I think on the whole, I think you're right. I mean, on the whole,
it's good to test the power centers, but it just makes me nervous in our attention economy
that the sexy thing seems to be the anti-establishment message.
And then it feels like that becomes a drug where you, everything,
anything the establishment says, anything institutions say, anything the mainstream
says must be wrong because it comes from the mainstream. I have that line that you're supposed
to take one red pill, not the whole bottle. Yeah. I am certainly one of those people who
is of the idea that they are dishonest, far more open that they're honest.
That said, there are people who are of the belief to use an extreme example
that Trump is still the shadow president and there's going to be these QAnon mass arrests.
I thought this was something that like the Daily Beast made up to make fun of MAGA,
but I was just in the phone with my buddy last night and he was like, no, no,
if you go to Troth Central, they're like all over there. And if you disagree with them,
they call you a controlled opposition or a grifter or so on and so forth.
Is it unfortunate or where?
Troth Central, Trump's social media outlet.
Oh, Truth Central, no, Truth Central.
Yeah, but he forgot the name of it himself.
Oh, I see the jokes. That's why I had to create jokes.
You got to explain the jokes. You got to explain the jokes.
You do like the way Twitter puts that context. You got to do the joke and then pause and
turn to the camera and explain.
And have a laugh track. Yeah, so people know where the jokes are. That's real humor.
Yeah. And then we just clapped.
And then everybody clapped.
I think for the last two years, especially vis-a-vis COVID, the overwhelming message was
the experts know what they're talking about. And if you are questioning this, you're a
vax denier and you basically should be read out of polite society.
And one obvious counter example to this was social distancing.
If social distancing was efficacious, why were there no attempts ever to bring it back,
right, when you had different waves? And if it wasn't efficacious, why was it so insistent
that we do it all do it at the very beginning?
In fact, in many places, you'll still see the signs on the floor where it's six feet apart.
So there's an incongruity there. And I think we are forgetting as a people the intensity
with and understandably, to some extent, if you have this worldwide deadly plague,
like it's going to be go where the leakiest hole is. So you really got to kind of get
everyone on board. But to the vehemence with which we're told, we know what we're doing.
This is the way to solve it. If you don't do it, you're causing mass death.
That, I think, fed in very heavily to people's enormous sense of skepticism toward establishment
sources. Speaking of the plague, you opened the book with that quote from Camus.
It's a strong, strong quote. Camus brings me to tears. And it's funny,
because I reread The Myth of Sisyphus, which I had been recommending to people.
And like, this book is not good, but his ethos is my favorite of all the philosophers.
It sounds like The Myth of Sisyphus was a myth.
He says, all I maintain is that on this earth, there are plagues and there are victims.
And it's up to us so far as possible not to join forces with the plagues.
And why I have that as the introductory quote to the book is, I think, morality and ethics are
very, very complicated subjects. There's lots of gray areas where you don't know which way to choose.
But at a base level, he has another quote that's ascribed to him he never actually said,
but something about, you know, is the duty of thinking people not to be on the side of the
executioners. If you are, we should do whatever we can not to have blood on our hands, not to be
murderers, not to want death. And that in and of itself is a big pill for a lot of people to
swallow. We're all brought up, taught that war is a last resort. And yet when it comes to
international affairs, it's always often a first priority and people are champing at the bit
to start going in and killing people. And what war means isn't good guy soldiers versus bad guy
soldiers. My concern is always with the civilians, with the kids who become orphans, with the wives
who become widows and things like that. And then communities which are, you know, ruined forever.
So I love that quote of his. I mean, the book started, it was going to be
a recontextualization of Camus's thought. I was going to rip off my old buddy, Ryan Holiday,
what he did with the Stoics and do about Camus. And then when I started rereading Camus, I'm like,
oh, I've read more into him than is really there. And then it went into a whole other direction.
So you wanted to do almost like an existentialist manifesto. So like,
one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Well, more like Camus for today and what his philosophy can teach
us like Ryan did with his many books about the Stoics. Yeah. And it was going to be called The
Point of Tears. Live to the Point of Tears? Yes, but the title was going to be The Point of Tears.
No, I know, but they're from that line. That's a good line, right? He has so many good lines.
Yeah. Maybe it's not. Probably shitty in bed though, right? Well, no, he was a big,
he was a big Lethario. He was probably pretty good. He got around.
What? What percent of the audience of humans on earth do you think know the word Lethario?
What percent of them have a computer? Look it up. Lethario. It's not some weird term.
Lethario. L-O-T-H-A-R-I-O, Lethario. Lethario. A man who behaves selfishly in a response to
being a sexual relationship with women, they're seduced by handsome, in quotes, they're seduced
by handsome Lethario who gains control of their financial affairs. Oh, I didn't think, I always
thought of his more as just someone who's like a stud. Like a player, but no, there's a malevolent.
Oh, I didn't realize that. Okay. Well, then he's selfishly. Okay. That's not him. Irresponsibly.
And a man too. Although, Ayn Rand would be proud selfishly. What's wrong with selfishness?
She wouldn't like that kind of selfishness. That's what he is.
A man who behaves selfishly and irresponsibly in his sexual relationships with women.
Huh. Yeah. Okay. So he was, he was just a player.
Maybe a stud. I don't think he was promiscuous particularly.
Nietzsche didn't get, he got, he didn't never got laid, right?
He had syphilis. He died of syphilis. Oh, like the, it was from prostitution.
Was it? Okay. Possibly.
You're asking me like I knew the guy. I heard it's from,
it, he'd never had a deep loving, fulfilling relationship. He had a very skewed understanding
on the way he wrote about women. Although somebody wrote to me and said that's a mischaracterization,
that he was actually very respectful of women. Yeah. But he had that line, if you're going before
women bring a whip, wasn't that him? Or is that your open heart?
If I were to quote you from your Twitter, I think I could make a very convincing argument
that you're a sexist, racist, and probably a Nazi. Well, I do own like some of Hitler's stuff.
Exactly. I got the, I rest my case. I feel like I'm a Nuremberg.
I'm going to be hung by his own tie. This isn't a tie, it's a noose.
You should have thought about that when you were saying all those things.
Okay. What do you think of the leak of the Twitter files?
I was so happy that Elon gave the information to Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, who are both,
by any metric lefties, who are both professional journalists of longstanding with great
resumes. And overnight now they're doing PR for the world, which is all that the party line was.
The fact that you had all these corporate journalists now having to play catch up
and not having control of the microphone to me was just absolutely amazing. I think transparency
is what brought down in many aspects of Soviet Union and what will bring down what negative
aspects of the regime we have here. When you see the machinations behind the scenes,
and then when you see the rationalizations after the fact, you realize, oh, these people
are not acting in good faith. The fact that, for example, the New York Post article about the
Hunter Biden laptop and how the New York Times covered it as well. They didn't mention any kind
of dick pics. Twitter made it so I couldn't even DM you the link to the New York Post article,
which was a tool they had previously used only to prevent child pornography. So that shows to
what extent they were willing to put their thumb on the scale. But it also shows that
for any layman, when they're looking at this to realize what you are perceiving as news or
information is very much sculpted, edited, and guided by powerful people who have a vested
interest in maintaining their power. I think to me, the important lesson is this not a left-to-right
thing. Oh, not at all. Power versus powerless, yes. But also the important lesson there,
I think at least in the case of Twitter, in our society, it's a slippery slope. You don't get
there overnight. You start using those tools a little bit, a little bit to slow down misinformation,
to just a little bit. You start sending emails to each other a little bit and it becomes more and
more, you start forming justifications, you're still getting a little more and more comfortable,
kind of talking about the stuff. I think there are several ways to fight that. One is having
hardcore integrity up front. So don't even open the door. But I think realistically, human nature
is what it is. And so I think the only way is through transparency. This is why the nice,
I hate the fact they got politicized. I really hate that the right has have run with it. Like,
look, the left is planning the rigged elections and so on. To me, it shouldn't be left-to-right,
it shouldn't be about politics. It's that transparency is good. Other companies should
do the same. Facebook should do the same. And in fact, that transparency will protect Facebook.
It will protect Google. Look, this is our situation. Tell us what to do and we'll do our best.
I remember when I was writing the new write, Twitter's line was, we're not going to tell you guys
what the metrics are by which we ban or censor people because then bad actors are going to
navigate around them. And it's like, what are you doing? Like, just tell people in any establishment
what are the rules for which behavior is permissible. If I go to a store, if I return the
sweater, is it cashback? No refunds or if I get store credit, you know what I mean?
So that they were having this place, which is presented as a huge international space
for public discourse. And they're not telling you ahead of time, this is what we will tolerate.
This is what we'll warn you about. This is what will kick you out overnight. That to me was
crazy and outrageous. And I'm really pleased with to what extent Elon is being open with their
policies. And what I really want to commend him about is, now I'm triggered, because one of the
things that he took over, he's like, our first priority is getting with a child pornography
and child exploitation. He's like, racial slurs, homophobic slurs, anti-Semitic slurs, yeah,
that's cool. Kids getting harmed is number one. And he fired the old task force because they
weren't doing their job. Eliza Blue, who you know, she had been on this for a long time,
but people who were victims of child pornography, child exploitation, were emailing Twitter,
being like, these are my images, get them off. And they're like, too bad, porn is allowed on
Twitter. He starts trying to crack down on it. This is a very hard problem because these bad
actors have mechanisms to evade being banned. They want to get there for lack of a better
term product out there. Forbes magazine, who is an agent of the devil, had a tweet and they tweeted
this nine times. Now that Elon's here, Twitter's child porn nightmare has gotten much worse.
They tweet this nine times. I looked up, anyone listening this can look up, look at Forbes and
do a search. They never mentioned this problem before. So now that Elon is doing something about
it, now it's a problem for you. No, it's a problem. Elon's the problem. It's not the child porn that
you guys had a problem with. And that to me is like, yeah, I understand that you think that
Elon is a bad guy because he's upset your apple cart. This isn't a political issue. This isn't
a gotcha moment. This is all right. Here are some tips. We talked to 10 experts, digital experts,
and here are some techniques, Mr. Musk, that you might want to take from us, free of charge,
that will help you solve this. That would be a great article.
And I just want to use this opportunity to say quite clearly and strongly that even though
Twitter and other parts of the internet are interpreting some of my statements to me and I'm
right in this case, meaning leaning right, right wing. And in other cases, leaning left, left
wing, I'm not, I'm apolitical, or at least I try to be in my thinking, take one issue at a time.
I do take an opinion on each issue at a time, but I hate camps. I try to avoid political camps in
general. It just, it sucks that promoting transparency in this case or celebrating transparency
is somehow connected to being right wing. No, it's being made into a supposed euphemism for
being right wing. It's just, it sucks. It sucks even though I'm wearing a red suit and this is a
very red themed conversation. Well, I mean, the revolution was the color of blood. I'm just gonna
let it sit on that for a second. Okay. You mentioned New York Times bestseller list.
You chose to self publish. Yes. And we just linger on that decision. What are the pros
and cons of self publishing? The cons are it is acceptable in our current business climate
or cultural climate for corporate media outlets to pretend the book doesn't exist.
So basically, and there's reason for it, I can make the case to them pretty easily.
If someone's doing it themselves, who is this guy's some crackpot writing crazy stuff from his
basement, right? It's a little different, I think, for me because I'm an established author.
C-Span gave me an hour on book TV. Still a crackpot, but yeah, established.
For Dear Reader, I think I was the first one to get an hour on book TV for a book that I did myself.
So there is space for that. It didn't go through a vetting process the way a book
going through a corporate publisher did. So those are the minuses. The pros are
I can drop it and publish it immediately. If you go through a corporate publisher,
you have to wait a year. You can do what you could have the book you want instead of getting
past the editor. And some editors are very, very good. And there's a whole spectrum. Some of them
not so good. Some are good. Some are not so good. I know the best. The real killers.
All right. Let's beat that. There's good people on both sides.
Yeah. There's funny good people on both sides. And I don't mean the white nationalists who I condemn
totally. But the thing is in terms of money, you get six times as much profit when you self-publish
than when you go through corporate publisher. The book stops here. It's in one of my books
that I co-authored. I won't even mention the name. There is a typo and they don't care.
They didn't fix it for the paperback edition. Here, since I'm going through Amazon, if there's a
typo, I can fix it live and it updates. Oh yeah? Yeah. You can just update it.
Yeah. So that's very useful. You feel like a fight club thing where
you can insert like a dick pic in one of the pages. Okay. Why are you so...
Why do you keep texting me to send you dick pics? I didn't know.
Talk about North Pole. Justin, you're right. All right.
That's why I'm not the editor. I get it. North Pole. I get it.
The other advantage just socially is I think people are... I found this with the kickstarter
I did for Dear Reader. People are much more excited to buy it and promote it and talk about it when
they know you're doing it yourself instead of you're getting a big check from St. Martin's,
HarperCollins, Penguin, whatever. Are you also trying to use some kind of service to get it
distributed to bookstores or are you just going to do Amazon? No, just Amazon. Yeah.
And that's probably where most sales happen anyway. The vast majority, yeah. So it's not
going to be in bookstores. So how difficult is the process of getting it on Amazon?
So I'll tell you a funny story about how Amazon works and because this was a... I always plan
for... Because everyone... People's... Here's another piece of advice I will give people.
Your life will be a lot easier if you realize that the majority of people in every industry
are bad at their jobs. Like once you have that realization, everything else makes sense and
your life will be a lot easier. So when I did the Anarchist Handbook, which was a collection of essays
from various anarchists throughout history, when I submitted it to Amazon, there was a lot of
copyright issues because they're like, do you have the rights to this essay? Do you have the rights
to this essay? I had to go back and forth with them a lot to make sure I had copyright where
everything was public domain. And the thing is you forward it, you update it, you give them
the information, three days, there's another problem, it's not three days, so it's weeks.
The other thing with their Create Space program is the paperback and the ebook, the Kindle,
are approved independently. So just because it's approved for one, it's not approved for the other.
After I published Anarchist Handbook and it was a big success, they unleashed... Unrolled, excuse me,
a hardcover edition program. So I'm like, oh, great, I'll put it in hardcover. They're like,
sorry, this is too similar to Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State, which is a pamphlet or
short book that Murray Rothbard wrote. I go, wait, I have the entirety of Anatomy of the State
in here. I have permission from the Mises Institute in writing, which I'm giving to you,
to reprint it. And you guys already haven't been published for a year as a paperback and ebook.
And they're like too bad, blocked. So it's not available as a hardcover on Amazon,
even though it's available. Maybe now it's going to be pulled as paperback and ebook.
So with this book, I was anticipating, all right, this is going to be some whatever.
The thing with how it works is you have to upload it and hit publish,
and then you got to wait for the approval. I'm like, okay, this is going to be who knows.
I just wanted to get as fast as possible. 4 a.m., less than 24 hours, I get a notification.
Congratulations, your book's available for sale. And after run downstairs and pull it
from publication, because otherwise it was out and I didn't finish editing it. So
that's the situation there. Oh, that's fascinating. But that's powerful. It's on
your hands. It's all on you. Yes. And I think the program is great. It charts just like any other
book. The quality of the books is great. I am very happy with, I have no contact with them.
My buddy Tucker Max, he had a company that did this and they basically helped people
sell, publish their own book. They did Dave Goggins book. I think you've talked to him, haven't you?
Yeah. Or yeah, maybe they emailed me or something. Yeah. And he said, I have done dozens,
maybe hundreds of books with them. I have never been able to get someone on the phone.
So I don't know what's going on over there. But guys, if you want to reach out to me,
please call me. It's michael at lexfreedman.com.
Freedman spelled wrong. Yeah. If you ever have any complaints,
please just add me at Twitter about Michael. No.
Why do you think so few established authors self-publish? I mean, why it seems like it
makes perfect sense in this modern society to be able to, when you finish the book,
to publish it within a few days, a few weeks? I think, I talked to Jordan Peterson about this
at length and Michaela, his daughter, who I'm also a good friends with. She's actually named
after Gorbachev, who's the big hero of this book. Also a friend? Michaela, I was in talks to interview
Gorbachev and then COVID hit. And that's one of the big regrets of my life that I didn't get.
I think if I met him, I would be on my knees, literally kissing his feet, crying. Because
I mean, one of the big points of the white pill is there were so many moments when they were calling
him up, sending the tanks, we want another Tiananmen Square. And he's like, fuck you.
So when you have anyone who has the capacity to murder thousands of people and chooses to
withhold that power, like all I could do is applaud. He resisted the cynicism.
Yes. Wait, so the authors, why don't they publish all the books? I think they're still in the...
You know how there's this whole idea about how if you're a movie actor, you don't go on TV,
because that kind of ruins your brand. So and that's kind of going away. There's a lot of shows
where the lead is now like a former movie actor. And this is kind of like the big thing, like
Matthew McConaughey, you know, he had a TV show on HBO, I believe. So I think there's this kind
of like, wait a minute, what's that? I hear he said... I said, all right. All right, all right,
all right. Matthew McConaughey, all right, all right. I don't know what that is. Sorry.
I'll explain it. What? Look at the context below.
Okay. So I think for them, it might be A, a loss of credibility to some extent,
but B, their agent whose job is to sell them and get a big advance wouldn't be encouraged
at the self-published because they're agents. So I don't think it's percolated to powerful people
yet how feasible this is and how profitable it is and how they'll still be able to reach their
audience. And I feel if, you know, I don't, if Anrik is Tambuk wasn't such a gigantic success,
I would be more and more nervous about the white pill. But the fact that it was and that I saw it
from start to finish and I know the ins and outs, now I'm like, what are you guys bringing to the
table? So that's taking a year of my time and introducing edits that I would not otherwise
agree with. I think for some people, a book is a, is a sort of beacon of reputation. So like,
so it's really important to not, there's somehow not as much reputation associated with a self-published
book unless it's successful. Yes. And then, and then like the, its success outshines the actual,
however it was published. I think, I guess David Goggins self-published his book.
Because it used to be you self-published when you can't get a book deal. So it's like an admission
of failure. Yeah. So you would recommend it as something for, for authors? No, I would recommend
it as something for authors of a certain stature for lack of better term. Because it is still,
in terms of your resume and your experience, it's better to get a crappy advance and have a book
with St. Martens that goes nowhere than a self-published book that goes nowhere. So the other thing
is you have to make sure you have enough of an audience that you can move some copies.
What about only fans? Would you recommend authors? How much money do you think you and
I can make if we did like bathtub scenes in only fans? No, just chilling, just reading,
like reading like Animal Farm, just like while sitting in the bathroom.
I don't know. Okay, Snowflake. Snowball. Sorry, Snowball. Okay, Snowball.
All right. What was his name? Snowball. No, the horse. Boxer. I'm hung like a boxer.
I will work harder. Yeah, that guy, I think about that guy a lot. Boxer? Yeah, his model was,
I will work harder, anything that happens. Like the pigs would take advantage and his response
to everything. He was inspiring to me because he never gave in to the cynicism.
Right. And they killed him. Yeah. Spoiler, sorry. But that's a good way to die, never giving in.
Well, yeah, there's a lot of that in this book about the people who were like,
I'm not, you're not going to break me. Like I am bigger than this.
Did you ever believe in Santa? I remember the day I woke up on New Years and there was a
president under my pillow and it was like, holy s**t. Because Deidre Miroz left it.
That's the whole thing. He leaves your president under your pillow.
Right. So you believed, but what, I thought the story was going to be when you first
realized he's not real. I don't remember when I realized he wasn't real,
but that story was, I did think it was real. I was like, oh my God.
And okay, there's this, because I did too. And I don't remember. I don't think I can put myself
in the mindset of the kind of person that believed he was real. Because what did I think,
what was my worldview that allowed like a giant person in a red suit to be real?
Although I do remember, I think the first time a Santa Claus showed up to our,
like lived in this very small apartment. And when he first showed up to our apartment,
I just remember it because he was really drunk and smelled. It was like a party.
It was like a New Year's party or whatever. So one of the, one of the people dressed up
a Santa Claus. And I just remember this, wow, this, this got like real fast.
Of course, like I remember like thinking, of course, of course it would be like, what was I
thinking? What was I thinking? It's going to be some perfect, like being a perfect being,
like better than like the best of humanity. It was just a regular dude, kind of fat,
but like not sexy fat. It was like, not really that jolly and kind of exhausted and
really have not showered in a while, but also funny. I remember, I love telling the story,
how old I was and I must have been five or six. And it was just that age where you
distinguish between what's real and what's not. So like Vikings and Knights and Ninjas are real
and dragons and mermaids and elves are fake. And I was on the corner of Shore Parkway right
before the park in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. And around the corner wearing a denim vest,
was a little person, a dwarf. And I saw him and I was like, all right, back to the drawing board.
Like, I don't know what's real or not anymore, because I just saw a dwarf. So I don't know
what's going on. And since then, given your relationship with Alex Jones, you've continued
the journey of not knowing what's real or not. That's correct. All right, let's talk about
the next steps. After Stalin took power, he started to actually implementing some of the
economic, some of the policies in this idea of collectivization. What's the story of that
in the 20s leading into the 30s? What was this idea? What was the relationship between the regime,
the ideology and the farmers? Well, there's always been, and obviously very much this
day, an enormous amount of enmity, for lack of better term, hatred between Ukraine and Russia.
I mean, this is centuries in the making, if not more. And the Ukraine, or Ukraine now, but
at the time, I'm speaking of the region, is and still is the bread basket of Europe. It was very
fertile lands. This is where the food comes from. And this was an issue also for Lenin,
as I discussed in the book, because when you had famines there, you have famines
throughout what later became the Soviet Union. And the problem is, this happened in North Korea
as well in the 90s, when they don't have food, if you let in foreigners and feed your people,
all of a sudden, you as the government are either superfluous or downright deleterious
to their well-being, and that's a threat to your power. So Lenin led in an American organization,
the early 20s, which was actually headed by Herbert Hoover of all people. And after a while,
Hoover left because he found that the Bolsheviks were just taking the grain that the Americans
were giving to feed the people and selling it for export while the people suffered. And one of the
people who grew up in these starvation times was a young Mikhail Gorbachev, where he had, you know,
I think it was like a quarter or a third of his village starved to death during one of these
periodic famines. Stalin's idea, this was a good mechanism for him to break the idea of Ukraine
being an independent nation within its own identity. And, you know, he had this kind of
liquidation of the kulaks, you know, very famously, which thankfully is much more discussed now
than it was maybe when you and I were kids. And a kulak, the real meaning or the literal meaning
is kind of this wealthy landowner, right? But very quickly, it's kind of like it becomes outgroup.
So, you know, there was a big incentive to call someone you didn't like a kulak and then good
luck to you because now the eyes of the state are on you. And you have to prove that, you know,
you didn't hire people, you didn't have four cows or how many acres or so and so forth.
They took a huge percentage of the population, the kulaks, and they just deported them, you know,
these are lands that they had for generations and they just spread them throughout
broader Russia. Many of them never made it and many of them were killed. This was by design.
And the dark thing about the kulaks, like you said, when it becomes abused, when it becomes the
outgroup is the kulak is supposed to be wealthier than sort of the general farmer peasant.
And so basically, it gives you a mechanism of resentment. Anybody that's better off
must be better off because they're a kulak. Let's get rid of them. And it has a,
just from an economics perspective, even leaving ethics aside, it basically completely de-incentivizes
productivity. Like it wants you to fail because if you succeed, you're a kulak and you're going
to be tortured, you're going to be deported, you're going to be derided, all that.
And also, you're poor because he's rich. Like that's a big part of it. So while this was going on
and food was becoming a problem because you had, you know, for weather conditions, there was a
campaign about, oh, the reason you're hungry is because the kulaks are hoarding all their grain.
And if you're somewhere else in the Soviet Union, how are you supposed to know any better?
Because you're being told every year the crops are bumper crop, bumper crop, bumper crop,
and now there's no food, there's no bread. And so, you see, we produced all this bread,
it's not getting to you because the kulaks are hoarding the grain. So there, they came like,
in what became known as the Haldemore and Applebaum, who's a great historian who, unfortunately,
I disagree with a lot of contemporary politics, but who's done so much great work about the
Soviet Union that I pretty much give her a blank check and whatever she wants to say. Nowadays,
you know, she wrote a great book about this called Red Famine. And these activists descended on
these villages like locusts. And their job was to requisition as much food as possible.
And they would come back, you know, at all hours of the night to make sure you weren't hiding food.
And this is what was so pernicious about it, your own body would betray you. They could look at you
and see that you're not losing weight, you got those chubby cheeks. That means you have food.
And that's the government's food. That is the food of the people. And if you are keeping food
for yourself, you are stealing from the people, you're an enemy of the people, and you deserve
whatever comes to you. And it got to a point where they're eating, they didn't have grain to plant
for the next harvest. And what was even sicker is, you know, one of the big criticisms of
communists of the Tsar was his internal passport system that I can't go where I want within Russia,
the Russian Empire, without permission. Stalin reintroduced this. So if your village was targeted,
you can't leave. Now, some people got away, they tried to get to the cities and so on and so forth.
But you get to the city and you're starving, you have no clothes, you're a kulak. I'm hungry
because of you. And now you're too lazy to work, get the F out of there. And there were stories,
you know, you know, I have them in the white pill of this like starving teenage girl and she's
begging for food. And the guy knocks the shopkeeper, knocks the food out of her hand and
she dies on the spot. And everyone in that line knew not to, you know, give her any food or any
sympathy, because she's a kulak sympathizer. And very quickly, if you're a kulak sympathizer,
all has to happen is someone has to call, I think it was the NKVD at the time, you know,
the different names, the Cheka, the secret police, and they had to be like, oh, you see,
whatever her name was, Zhenya, she was a kulak sympathizer. We saw a kulak who was trying to
shake us down for food because too lazy to work and she felt so bad for them. So you might want
to check in on Zhenya. So yeah. But in 32 and 33, Holodomor, it wasn't just
small injustice here and there. It was mass starvation and suffering. Yes, millions starved
to death in the Ukraine alone and by design. So you mentioned Ann Applebaum's book,
Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, but another excellent book on the topic. And by the way,
thank you for recommending that to me. So it was... Her work's amazing. Yeah. It's a really,
really powerful book about not just about Holodomor, but like the context of Ukraine,
basically the history of Ukraine that's relevant for today. Yeah. To understand,
understand the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. But another great book is Bloodlands,
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. I don't know. I think you also recommend
that to me at some point, or maybe not. I haven't, but I'm familiar with that and read it.
So he does quite a bit of... It's brief, but extremely well researched writing about cannibalism
there and that it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed famine in the Soviet Ukraine for
parents to cook and eat their children. He writes, quote, survival was immoral as well as the physical
struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal,
but was not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you.
In quotes, the good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died.
Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused
to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.
And there's stories in there about cooking, cooking your children.
The other thing about cannibalism, about famine in general, that stood out to me,
unlike a lot of atrocities, is the people that are starving are exhausted. They're basically
unable to think. So they don't even have the energy to protest. It's a strange kind of way
to kill thinking in the populace. I suppose it was obvious, but there's something fundamental
about starvation where it slowly removes your humanity. Yeah, there was a scene in the book
where a lot of times people literally go crazy. And there's a scene where a mom in some train
station was nursing her kid, and she was going mad from hunger, and she starts beating the crap
about her baby and kicking it, and then she just reverts to normal like nothing had happened.
Yeah, madness. You lose your mind. Yeah. And I don't know what the physiological
cause of this. It's not just, I think it's, if someone has dealt with glycogen depletion,
it affects their mood, things like that. So taken to an extreme who knows what happens when
parts of the brain start functioning and start imploding. But yeah, it's what just happened.
This is something that's really cool regarding the Holodomor. So there was one western journalist,
Gareth Jones, who was like, all right, something's not adding up here. So he was supposed to take a
train through Ukraine, and he got out early and decided to start walking through the countryside
to go from village to village. And I'll get to his story in a minute. Right before we started
recording, I got this book in the mail. I ordered it on November 28th from Great Britain. It was
the only copy available on the whole internet. It's called Experiences in Russian 1931. It is
anonymous. And it's Gareth Jones wrote the introduction. It was published by the Alton
Press in Pittsburgh. It was self published. And he just says forward, it's just says by the author.
So it was the author who went alongside Gareth Jones was summoned by the name of
Henry John Heinz, who was heir to the Heinz fortune. And you only know that if you start
looking at the internet because his name is not in this book. Well, I opened this book up
right when I got it right before we're taping. And it's signed by him. And it took me a second.
I'm like, wait a minute, who's this signed by? And it's H.J. Heinz because his name was Jack
Heinz, but it was Henry John Heinz from. So this is, I'm very excited that I had this little
miracle in the mail. But Christmas miracle. It's a Christmas miracle. They traveled,
they traveled together. They traveled together. So this book's a diary of their travels. Why
do you think so few journalists, they was able to do what he did. So there were several reasons.
First of all, if you were a Western journalist in the Soviet Union, you were under very strict
circumstances. First of all, you could be deported at any time. You had no, there was no pretense
that you have a right to be a journalist in, especially as a representative of a capitalist
by which they meant Western paper. Second, it was a complete nightmare getting your papers,
your articles filed because you had a sensor that you had to go through and the sensor's job,
whose life depended on it was to make sure that your story was advantageous to the Soviet Union
or at least neutral. And they had all sorts of techniques. They could spy, they spy on you
all the time. They filed you around because you're a foreigner, but also that sensor had to answer
to somebody. So all the sensor has to do is be like, look, I having trouble with my supervisor
and the reporter could be like, well, can I talk to the supervisor? It's like, well, I'm sorry,
that's not possible. And he's on deadline, but it's too bad. Bureaucracy doesn't recognize the needs
of deadlines. So there was a big pressure, a lot of pressure on Western journalists to
have to get through this net. And that's literally constant. Every story, it's going to be a fight.
So at a certain point, you're just going to be like, all right, and you're going to
pre-sensor yourself. If you know, all right, if I include this, it's not going to get through.
What are you supposed to do? I think human beings are naturally, and also a lot of these journalists
were pro-Soviet. They thought this is the society of the future. At least everyone's trying to make
it a better country for everyone, not like back home where the poor slip between the cracks.
We got to do what we can to make this work. And there was a lot of, I don't want to say
conspiracy, but within the industry, there was a consensus that the Stalin was the good guy,
and we were, if not the bad guys, certainly not as good in certain regards. So when this news of
the famine started percolating, all the other Western journalists besides Gareth Jones and
Malcolm Muggeridge were saying this isn't true. It's nothing that they haven't seen before.
The paper that took the lead in this was in New York Times with their guy Walter Duranty,
who had previously won a Pulitzer and had interviewed Stalin, which was an enormously rare
honor for a Westerner. And he, because he has so much experience covering Russia and the Soviet
Union, he basically took the lead and other people followed his lead. He was kind of the
dean of the press corps in Russia, and he made a point. And the thing, there's so many quotes
I have from him where he's not only denying that this mass starvation is happening, he's also
going after journalists who are questioning the narrative. And he says things like, look,
this is nothing that the Russians haven't experienced before. They're simply tightening
their belts. And it's like, you only have to tighten your belt when you don't have enough
food. It's not like they started a new exercise regimen, and now their body fat's dropping.
That's why would someone tighten their belt? So that was one. And the New York Times had a 13-page
article, big headline, Russians Hungry Not Starving. And he went after Jones. He went after
Margarige, I believe. No, he did go after Margarige. But the point being that this is just propaganda
from people who want the Soviet Union to fail. They don't understand what they're building here.
He had so many excuses, like, oh, the reason all these Russians are supposedly leaving their
villages to go to the cities isn't because there's no food. It's because they're nomadic. It's tradition.
They go from town to town looking for new experiences. And it's just at a certain point,
and I think it was 1941, where he was eventually like, or 51, I don't remember, he was like, oh,
well, I guess I was kind of wrong. And it's like, he's like, any journalist worth his salt can admit
when he's wrong. And it's like, well, were you worth your salt? Because he explicitly said,
there's no point in sending out journalists to look for themselves. I've been through the
countryside and everyone's fine. And it's just that the loudest people are making noise, whereas
everyone else is doing the work and, you know, trying, and, and this isn't about famine, but
it's about Western skeptical about collectivization, which is just simply a new way of farming. And
yeah, it was a new way of farming. And the results were by design, and also accidentally
absolutely catastrophic. How hard was it to see the truth at that time, do you think? Do you think
that was a mistake that's understandable to make as a journalist? If my job as a journalist,
I have two bosses, if I'm in Moscow, I've got my reporter in New York or London or whatever,
but I've got my sensor here. And he is making sure I have a house, the department, he makes sure
I have food, he makes sure I have access to dignitaries. He's my lifeline. If I piss him off,
I'm on the next plane out of town. So is that enough? Is that enough to
slowly suffocate the integrity of a journalist? I don't think it was slow at all. And it was
clearly enough. And because what are they going to do? I disagree with that. I think the failure
of integrity has to come from New York on the American side, that it's just the flock of fish
or whatever that all move in the same narrative. I think journalists would like to be the kind
of people that have integrity. So if they are conscious of sacrificing their own integrity,
they wouldn't do it. If they're conscious of an act that's doing it, they wouldn't do it.
So it has to happen like a lobster slowly boiling. No, I think it happens when everyone else is,
it's a Greek chorus, right? Right, it's a chorus. But that's exactly, that's right. So it's not
about the act, but they will, I mean, I've talked to journalists where I get the sense that they
will sell their soul for access. Because that's their job. Is it though? Because what they do,
what journalists do, I've seen American journalists, they take a huge amount of pride for having gotten
the interview, whatever that is, the Putin interview. And first of all, they're glowing
with pride. It seems like they're always showing off to the other journalists back in America.
So they're showing off like, look, I got the access, you didn't. And second thing they're
doing when they show up to that interview is they ask all the questions that signal to the
other journalists that we're on the same side. They ask the most generic, aggressive questions
to which they know the answers. They want to basically get the access and ask the quote,
unquote, hard hitting questions that they know will not be answered. And this is the
entire machinery of it. That's modern journalism. And I suppose at that time,
it was worse. It was worse. They weren't even doing the hard hitting, the display of hard
hitting questions. Right. Because think about what high status that is. If I'm an American
journalist in Moscow, I'm allowed in this secretive country, I'm the guy who's very privileged to
have access to live in Moscow and tell Americans, which are all fascinated about this new society,
the future, what it's like. And as soon as I kind of start questioning the narrative,
I'm going to get kicked out and humiliated very publicly. I thought you were in Moscow. What
am I supposed to say? Eugene Lyons, he's one of the heroes in the book. He was a young
communist and I think it was United Press. He was working for, they sent him there. And when he
went there, he's like, oh, this is not what I thought it was going to be like. This is horrible
and he turned very heavily against it. But he talks about how they would write one thing and say
another thing and then think another thing. And each of those steps was just more and more like
kind of lying in terms of maintaining your sanity and maintaining your narrative.
So you reference Ann Applebaum and say that quote, starvation was not simply a consequence,
it was the goal and it was the law. Stalin intended to break the Ukrainians once and for all.
It thus became common for villagers to spy and inform on one another, turning in a neighbor
for having a sack of grain might be the easiest and safest way to procure food for one's family.
To what degree was this the intention? To what degree did Stalin anticipate this kind of
suffering as a consequence of the collectivization policy? I don't know that he intended the
suffering to be a consequence of the collectivization, but it was quite apparent and I think there's a
pretty heavy consensus nowadays that his goal was very much because Ukraine again
resented the Tsar and had this kind of very contentious relationship with Russia,
which obviously very clearly remains today. I mean, the hatred of Ukrainians for Russians
preceded Putin's war. I mean, this is even when I was a kid, I obviously don't remember it,
but my parents just told me like the hatred that they had. And understandably, I mean,
they're basically for an occupation, what they regard as for an occupation.
So your parents talked about a hatred by Ukrainians towards Russians?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I mean, I, you know, I certainly having visited there this year,
because of the most recent invasion in February, that hatred is nationwide and very intense.
But I don't know, I think the feeling, the emotions were much more complex before.
But at the same time, they were under occupation before, right? And they couldn't speak Ukrainian,
they had to speak Russian. So this was a thing.
But because of the forced intermixing, it's a more complex story.
Okay. I mean, they weren't certainly fans.
Yeah, but there's people that came from Russia that are living there,
they're marrying, they're falling in love, they're working with each other. So like,
there is a, the bigger atrocity of the genocide of it, but there's also the reality of intermixing
of the peoples, right? Well, sure. I mean, there's the atrocity of slavery in the United States.
But then there's also a reality that there's now an intermixing of a, of a peoples,
and now they fall in love and they live after slavery is abolished.
It's, that's just the real, like a, after the genocide,
right? Proceeds a kind of generational integration that still remembers,
like the suffering reverberates, but there's still, it's a different culture that's created.
And now I think,
I mean, I have complex story. I mean, most of my family is from Ukraine. So I have a,
and my understanding is grounded in Soviet Ukraine, but there's something in the last 30 years
that's different, where now after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there's a true,
maybe renewed fight for independence. And that's a different thing.
But there's also a difference, like, you know, if I go to North Korea as an American,
right, they're very friendly now, right? They don't perceive me as part of the Yank devils.
They're like, okay, you're an American, but you, you know, you come from America. So,
yeah, there's going to be intermarriage, but that's a big difference between the perception of
Russia as an entity, as opposed to some individual Russians.
I just, that wasn't the, the experience I've had talking to a lot of friends and family in
Ukraine until the war started. Really? So they really didn't have this kind of low-key animosity
toward Russians? No. There was a lot of factional conflict inside Ukraine. Okay.
Now the whole country is united. I think, I think there's a clarity now. The war gave a clarity
that wasn't there before. No, this is, I was saying earlier how humans define themselves
by opposition. So now that there's a war, it's like, okay, this, all this little stuff doesn't
matter. We are all united because we have a common enemy. But there's also, as, as you know, there's
regions and there's, there's just groups of different people that, and then one of the big
divides, of course, is the city versus rural. And then in the case of Ukraine, it's, it's
Eastern Ukraine and Western Ukraine. It's very difficult to know what the truth is,
because my personal experience is sampled. Right. You know, I don't, I don't know how many
Ukrainians I know, maybe like 30 or 40 before this trip, like 30 or 40. And then I'm close with
just a handful. But then it's hard to know because you get a lot of Western press perspective
and you get the Russian perspective and you got other perspectives. It's very hard to know
how much hate there is outside of this conflict. So my, my, my primary question is, and this is
what I ask a lot of people when I visit Ukraine is, will you ever, will you ever be able to forgive
the Russians? And a lot of people said, never, never. So this isn't just about assuming, assuming
we win, they would say, assuming we win was still not ever forgive. Never, never, never forgive.
And, and they said it in a way where like, not only us, but our children will never forgive.
And that, and it wasn't just, you know what, it wasn't just about Russia or the Russian leadership
is about the Russian people. But a lot of people also said that this is, this is our feeling
currently we understand. Like you, you're lost in the, the rage of war. Because you lose so much.
I mean, if you asked Americans, would you ever be friends with Germany or Japan? It'd be like,
are you kidding? After Pearl Harbor? Yeah. But of course, most Americans didn't feel Pearl Harbor
is different. It's a good point when it's your own land. But when, when imagine it wasn't just
Pearl Harbor, but it was New York and, and Chicago and, and Dallas and all these cities
being, being bombed. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's just a linger on this war in Ukraine currently. Does
it break your heart to see what's going on there now that it's on the same land as the same cities,
the same stories are now like brought back to the surface, like the generational pain
as it was in the, in the time that you're writing about. Do you think it's a fundamentally different
country, different war, different situation? Or does it, do you, do you hear echoes of the same?
I don't think it's the same because I think there is no one, or I mean, there is no one
who is like, I'm glad this is happening to the Ukrainian people, right? So even the people who
were for Putin and for the invasion and whatever justification they might have for his war,
no one is like, yeah, let's get those, you know, darn Ukrainians. I think there was that sense in
America after 9 11, when we invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and there was like F those Iraqis,
F those Afghan people. Whereas now I think it's completely opposite. I think, I don't, I also
think a lot of Russians, I'm sure if I ask them, they're not thinking like, let's wipe the Ukrainian
people off the map. I think whatever reasons they have, it's not kind of going after this.
Even if you have to kind of rile up people against the citizenry, it's not to that level
of the hatred of the Kulaks, hatred of, of those villages. There's still a belief though, amongst
the soldiers outside of the big cities, their belief that the Ukrainian people who the Russian
soldiers believe are their brothers and sisters are occupied by an evil regime.
Okay. So you need to save them from the evil regime.
That's also very different from, you know, the Holodomor and also there is dispute in the press
about the causes, the consequences, the victims, the villains of Putin's war. But when it came to this,
no one, no one is denying that the war is happening. The New York Times isn't saying,
everything is fine. And the only reason people are saying it's a problem is because they hate
Putin or they hate Zelensky. That's not a thing. And the fact that we have so much footage
of what's happening in Ukraine. And, you know, you have, it takes two seconds to go and Google
and you have a map of, you know, Russian advancement. What are the, what parts are they
occupying? What parts are not of their control? You know, I did a little live stream, I raised
money for Ukrainian refugees to feed them because that's my concern is just keeping people fed.
There was none of that, you know, and the two people who kind of spoke the truth,
the Gareth Jones was shot, I think, the day before his 30th birthday while he was undercovering
you, I think it was in Mongolia, Malcolm Muggeridge had problem finding work when he exposed this.
And I think the, like we was talking about earlier, the ubiquity of things like cell phones and
camera phones would make something like this, I don't know, I wouldn't say an impossibility,
they could still do it, but it would be really hard to cover it up.
Well, sort of to push back on that, if you just look at Iran, I would draw different, so I agree
with you mostly, but I would also draw a different distinction when the atrocities happening to
your own people versus there's a war. Ukraine is a sovereign independent nation, there's
no war between two nations. It feels like it's easier for journalists to somehow reveal the
truth in that when the atrocity is happening within the Soviet Union, for some reason,
that's easier to hide. That's easier for journalists to deceive themselves and easier
for the authoritarian leader to hide the information. I agree with you.
And so that's the dark, I mean, that's why people, maybe you can educate me on this,
but this is why I think people don't talk about Haldemur and other atrocities,
the Great Leap Forward, because it's inside the country versus the Holocaust, that's part of a war.
Why is that that we,
there were two almost afraid to polite to, what is it that we don't want to cover the atrocities
because inside the country, like it's their business, so we don't want to touch it?
No, I don't get it. What is it? Why?
I think it's that what we refer to as the news is in the business of selling narratives, right?
And the narrative of the Holocaust is a very powerful one, which is if you let hatred of a
subgroup in a population get out of control, this is the ultimate consequence. And this is
something that we all have to be scared of and do everything in our power to avoid in the future
for any outgroup. Whereas, what's the narrative of the Haldemur? Sometimes governments kill their
own citizens, there's nothing you could do about it, there's nothing we, I mean, they wouldn't
have let us send food, they wouldn't, like the newspapers, even Russia weren't acknowledging
it, like what's the, like this is some of the issues I had with regard to trying to advocate
for the North Korean people. The reporters would be like, well, what can I do as an American?
It's a very natural question. And I'm like, I don't know. I like, all I know is how to speak
to what is happening, but in terms of next steps, I don't have a good answer for you.
So that is where the news kind of does break down. If there isn't a story or a call to action,
the kind of, you're kind of almost like having a movie with a cliffhanger and there's no sequel.
It's like, what am I supposed to do here? Like this is not scratching that itch,
which for me, as a consumer of news, you know, layman is like, okay, here's the story. There was
a bad guy and the cop shot him or they took him to jail and now the bad guy's caught beginning,
middle end. Here, it's just like Mao did this. A lot of people were executed and starved. Isn't
that awful? Well, and Mao's still in power and Richard Nixon is raising a toast to him. Like
that story is just like, how am I supposed to feel about this? Yeah, it feels like when there's
tanks and there's war and there's military conflict, then it's more actionable. You can cover it.
Yeah. You know, it did seem like Nazi Germany. I don't know if the Holocaust was the thing that
made it most coverable. I think it was that this is a threat to the entire civilization.
Well, yeah, we were at war with them. Yeah. This is, that's what makes it coverable. And
if the Holocaust was happening just inside the country, inside of Germany,
or even if it didn't expand beyond Poland. Yeah, it would be like a footnote. It wasn't
in many ways a footnote. Like many of the early steps toward it was like, they didn't cover.
It's just like, all right, they're being oppressive toward their own people. Okay.
Especially given some of the, maybe if you negotiate certain peace treaties with the
Soviet Union and with Germany, like you're too, the basic, the pacifist imperative. Oh, boy.
Sorry, Santa.
Yeah. So we say every time you, uh, masturbate, no, after you're done, you know, I'm sorry.
All right. Now see, I hate it when you don't, yes, and because it leaves me in a whole, I dug
for myself. Um, and I sit there in a hole in my sadness. How long have you been writing this book?
I mean, mentally, it was like two years since you spent time with it. What, um,
now almost three, two and a half. Yeah. And I suppose it stages you much longer,
like you said, your family. So in many ways, this is a book you've been writing your whole life.
I think that's fair that all my work's been leading to this. Yeah.
It's certainly the most, in my opinion, the most important thing I've done.
What stands out to you, uh, about Holodomor? What moments, what, what aspects of human nature
stand out to you? I don't know. I think that story is, I don't want to say story, but I mean,
like that incident is, I mean, I was familiar with it before, you know what I mean? So I
kind of knew about it, you know, in part, thanks to kind of the North Korean work and coming from
Ukraine. Um, the thing that was also kind of insane about it is that they were taking all
this grain and not using it even to feed the Russian people. They were selling it for export
for hard currency. Um, I think what the takeaway there, and I think again, this is something
Westerners and especially Americans don't appreciate, they think that evil often has
like a logic to it, right? And it's like, why would, like, because it makes no sense to them,
like, why would they kill their own people? Uh, therefore it probably didn't happen,
right? There's that thing. They really think like, okay, they can understand, you know,
country A, country B, and slaughter as a bunch of people, country B as a means of conquest.
Like that kind of makes sense to them. They know that thing. But like, why are you starving all
these people? Like, what are you gaining out of it? That doesn't make sense to them. And because
it doesn't make sense, there's kind of like, well, it's probably more of the story that I'm hearing.
And a lot of times there's not. It's just like evil for the sake of power. Um, and we don't
really have that, certainly anywhere near that scale and never have. Um, certainly, you know,
since, since, since America has been a thing. I mean, it's, it's, it's, and the fact that this is
like the thirties, you know what I mean? This isn't that long ago. Uh, but I think also the,
the narrative in some ways is how, you know, technology is also something that kind of people
have mixed feelings about. I think, like I said this before, and this is something I really believe
very strongly. The ability of information to be captured and spread easily is such an effective
tool in exposing, uh, humanity at its worst. Because it's one thing if I sit here and tell you
what I saw in these villages, it's another thing that I sat you down and showed you a YouTube.
And you know, you and I don't know what it's like to look in the eyes of someone who's
uh, thinking about eating their own kids. I mean, and you see that face and you know it's,
you know, not something some CGI, it's, it will haunt you forever.
Just looking at the different mechanisms that made all of this happen. So this is not just
one guy Stalin having a policy. There's a whole system. Uh, I mean, one of it is just a system
of fear. But how do you implement that system of fear? Well, there's a giant bureaucracy of fear.
Yeah. So what he implemented with the great terror is-
That's in the 30s, in the late 30s.
It's throughout the 30s, but yeah, like it starts in the mid to late 30s. Basically,
you know, communism was based on the common good and the public good. And anything private,
which was bourgeois, was a problem. When they were started, you know, when the revolution came,
the October revolution, they wanted to recreate society entirely. And that included like, okay,
let's make it so, um, uh, everyone eats in like cafeterias. So they're eating by themselves.
Let's design buildings so everyone has to share bathrooms. Like their whole plan
was to have, eliminate any kind of concept of privacy at all. They also had this bizarre kind
of radical idea of, uh, like attacking shame. So many of these, you know, before the 1917,
people were also very involved, like free love, uh, because the idea of like having this
private bond between husband and wife was also bourgeois in old fashioned. And you know, we're
the society of the future. That changed relatively quickly, but they were talking about things like
raising kids communally, uh, and so on and so forth. So for Stalin, if you and I are friends,
we have a bond that's a threat to him. The family's a threat. The, any kind of organization is a
threat because it's a power center that is, uh, not between a relationship between you and him.
Now you have a relationship with somebody else. So he systemically went through that whole society
and you know, it became, there were certain things that became a crime. Then it became a
crime to be a spouse of the enemy of the people. Now right away, I as a child become an orphan
because my dad wasn't any of the people. My mom is married to an enemy of the people.
Now I don't have parents. They get arrested or executed or whatever. But now I, I've nowhere
to go, but I can't go to my friend's house because their family doesn't want to take in a child at
the enemy of the people. Um, you had this culture where everyone was very much encouraged to turn
people in. And if you turn, if you're arrested, you know, and tortured, you're like, okay, who are
your accomplices? And now you just got to name names, people you knew. And then it becomes this whole
chain. And it's like, how am I going to protest my innocence? If Lex just said, you know, I, uh,
worked with Michael and we were working with Trotsky's and we were plotting to overthrow Stalin.
Lex testified to this. He signed a confession. What am I supposed to do now? Right? So it worked
its way in a most viral fashion through the whole society. There was this amazing moment where
these poor people, peasants, cause obviously the powerless are often going to be caught in the
web. They were going to jail for being Trotskyites and they had to ask themselves, what's a tractorist?
Like they didn't even know who Trotsky was. Uh, and the thing, other thing is ethnicity was a
problem, right? If you were an ethnicity, you have more in power with other members of that
ethnicity than you have with this kind of broader Soviet culture. So he would just deport entire
populations from their ancestral lands to other parts, a to spread the population around, but
also to break that link between the peoples and their lands. There was this 1937 and KBD order
against Polish people where it's just like, if you had come from Poland or had been just this
whole list and basically people were being arrested cause they had Polish last names and I think it
was a million people were killed, like some astronomical number. Um, so there was this anything
that was a bond was a threat to him and it went systemically. So after he had all these kind of
executions of people who were like Lenin's people, the old Bolsheviks, then he went after,
he started arresting the secret police. You know, he arrested all the cops, he arrested all the
judges and all these prisoners got to see the judges who yelled at them for being counter
revolutionaries and spies. Now they were in the jails. If you were a foreigner, if there was a huge
push from the Soviet Union toward African Americans, right? Cause they're like, look,
you were living in a racist country. Here we have no racial inequality. Come, come live here.
A bunch of them went and they were all vanished. You know, anyone who knew information about the
outside world, if you were a foreigner, Andre Babel, I forget his first name, he had a French
writer he was friends with. He was arrested and shot cause he's a spy cause you're friends with
Melrose and that means, if you know a foreigner, you're a spy. Speaking of Esperanto became a
crime. Having a pen pal, literally anything that was some kind of chain between yourself and someone
else was a threat and it was grounds for arrest. It was, the Russians would joke about how relieved
they would be if someone knocked on your door in the middle of the night to tell you your house was
on fire cause it wasn't the NKVD coming to arrest you. And of course most of the accusations
probably were completely false. So not only cause you not do all of those things, you
were also a victim of just... Being late to work became a felony and also not doing your job became
a felony cause now you're taking food or product away from the people and you're supposed to be
there working for the people. There's this one story which, you know, I was doing the audio book
and this is like, I still try and get through without crying. This was 1920. They were a bunch
of kids in Moscow who were pickpockets between ages 11 and 15. They rounded them up and they're
like, all right, point out your accomplices. And they would take them in the trams and you have
to point out people. Then they would take them back to the seller, beat the crap out of these
children and then they take them out again. And if they didn't point out to anybody,
they beat them. They're like, all right. So they just start pointing at random. And the thing that
was really sick about this story, if that wasn't sick enough is that the screams that the other
criminals, the adult hardened criminals had to hear from these children as they realized they
were being taken back to the seller. It was just horrifying. And so they tortured people.
They tortured confessions out of people at scale. And the dark aspect of this is it's all,
it's like this weird, it's a bureaucracy of torture. So it's not like there's,
what is it? The torturer is afraid of like does it so that he doesn't become the prisoner.
Right. Because then it's like, oh, you couldn't get a confession out of him. Are you an enemy
of the people now as well? And the thing that was even crazier is that a lot of these interrogators
were frustrated because they're like, look, we both know you're innocent. Just sign this confession
to make my life easier. They knew it was crap. Stalin joked about, Stalin joked about this.
This is one of his little jokes. There was a kid who was arrested and he was said, oh, it was forced
to say, you wrote Eugene O'Negan, which is a play. It goes, that play was by Pushkin and they
tortured him and tortured him and tortured him. And then his parents are walking down the street
and they run into a secret police and they go, congratulations. And they go, for what? They go,
your son wrote Eugene O'Negan. Like he admitted to it last night. Like it's just like they could
get you to say anything. And what else was really, really sick, which they understood
is they lower the death penalty for kids, I think to either 14 or 12. I don't remember the top of
my head. And what Stalin's head of the secret police did is when you were interrogating someone,
they would, you either had to have some of your family member of that family members
possessions on the desk or a copy of the decree that saying, you know, that they can go after
your family and the amount of people who would confess to anything when they saw their family
was in danger and they knew this wasn't a bluff, was astronomical. And then it becomes a chain
because if you confess and I have your confession, how hard is it to get your neighbor?
What do you make of the, for a time, for most of the time, the NKVD was about the head of NKVD,
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria.
No, Beria, yeah. I have a death warrant signed by him hanging in my kitchen that I acquired.
He was one of the most evil people who ever lived. The thing that Americans don't appreciate is
how clever some of this sadism is. So there was one actress, I think he took her back to his house
and he asked her to, he tried to get her to sleep with him and he promised her that
if she did her father and either her husband or her grandfather, which one it was, is going to be
released from jail. Well, they were already dead at that point. He had them executed.
They're still finding the bodies of the women he murdered in the grounds of his dachets and
embassy now. And the thing is Stalin knew because at one point Stalin, there's a picture of Stalin's
daughter in his lap, you know, and she was at his house one day and Stalin calls up, he goes,
get out of there immediately. So he, like a good bureaucrat, he kept a list of all of his
sexual partners. It's still sealed, but both him and his bodyguard had this list.
So just to clarify, he headed the operation that did this whole giant mechanism of forced
confessions. Yes. He was part of expanding the Gulag. So he was in the head of the Gulags,
but he was part of this giant machine. And his famous quote was, show me the man and I'll show
you the crime. Yeah. But on top of that, what you're describing is he was also related or not,
was also just a mass rapist. Yes. And there's some dispute about whether he went after kids with
his rapes, but there's plenty of adults women that were targets for this. There was also another
little joke about him, about how Stalin is looking for his pipe and he can't find it and he calls
Beria and he's like, okay, I can't find this pipe. And then the afternoon he calls Beria again,
he's like, oh, I found the pipe. He goes, but come at Stalin, we've got four people to confess
to steal it already. So you have to laugh, but then you think about the nature of how it operates.
Well, it's also the fact that this kind of person was allowed to run. I mean, I suppose
it's all different kinds of evil and rape was just a part of the story.
His own personal willingness to
oversee torture and commit torture himself and rape. But it's also what happens when you're in
a country where it has no rights of any kind. And by the way, I should mention that people should
get your book and audio, when is your audio book coming out? It's in a couple of weeks,
so it'll be out shortly. You gave me the great honor of voicing this man. That's for the promo.
After the promo. Yeah, excellent. I appreciate that.
For a moment, I actually, it was really difficult.
Really? Yeah. It was just a sentence. I understand. I understand.
Because it takes you to that place. Oh yeah, because he told her scream if you want,
doesn't matter. Yeah. And he was right. Like, that's the thing, he wasn't bluffing.
She could scream, these women could scream their head off. No one's gonna come help him.
He would drive around Moscow at night in his limo looking for victims.
But somehow me saying those words was tough. I'm sure. It was tough.
But because this is where we came from, do you know what I mean? This isn't just like some kind of
Tolkien villain. But it also was tough because I could see myself being somewhere in that machine
somewhere. Like somehow that put me right there. Like there, any cog in that machine is committing
evil. Yes. That's the dark thing. I think the higher you are to the top, the closer you are to the
top, the more ability you have to stop it. But the less, the more freedom you have to stop it,
I suppose, to a point, yeah. But like the little things. So Beria had the freedom to commit rape
or not to. And so he chooses to sort of increase the amount of evil he's putting out into the
world. But then you have to counterbalance that as dark as this calculus is. After Stalin dies,
like that week, they start making the gulag shrink. They start pulling back on the concentrate,
the labor camps. So I mean, so that is a big plus in his side. Like you start liberating,
having this mass amnesty and freeing people from work camps. That's not minor thing. So it's crazy.
Like it's like, I'm not Saint Peter, right? I don't know. I'm not saying he's a good person,
but it's kind of insane that someone can do things that everyone listening to this would
regard as pure evil. And at the same time, this guy also, when the time came, saved tens of thousands
of lives. So in some sense, Stalin is the kind of cancer that permeates all the Soviet minds.
And once it's gone, you almost like, wake up, wait a minute. What the fuck was I a part of?
And Khrushchev was a 56 when he gave a secret speech behind closed doors. And he's just like,
all this criticism of Stalin was true. This is complete on one Marxism. He tried to solve
the system. This is not what Marxism is about. We can't have a personality cult. Stalin killed
all these top generals. And when Hitler turned to betray the pact and invaded, Stalin didn't
believe his buddy Hitler was going to do this. And as a result of this, we lost a lot of territory
in lives. This is not a military genius. This was Stalin being an idiot or a moron, whatever
term you want to be. So yeah, but the thing is, Khrushchev also was a butcher. He had a lot of
blood in his hands. You don't become the tick-style seat without having overlooked a lot of murder
and chaos. That's why it's called subtitled books, A Tale of Good and Evil. There's so much
malevolence to go around. What do you think was going to Stalin's mind in the 20s and the 30s?
Did he directly allow himself to acknowledge the reality of the suffering he was causing?
What does it take to be that human? I'm almost interested to extract lessons from that for
leaders of today. How hard is it? Is it that Stalin is evil or can you just delude yourself
gradually into where you don't have a sense of the effect of your policies and the populace?
Well, you're not deluding yourself because you have around you an entire government of people
telling you 24-7 how great you are, how thankful they are for you, how awesome you are, you're the
best. That's certainly going to play into it. I've asked myself that question as well. Do these
people believe they're on bullshit? I think the receipts are when Elena Ceausescu, who's
one of the four women on the cover, when she's being taken away to be executed in 1989,
she's yelling at the soldiers, how could you? I raised you like a mother. She at least believed
her own bullshit. With Stalin, he was obviously extremely intelligent. I think it's easy for
us to psychologize and say he's a sociopath, he's a narcissist, he's this, he's that.
At a certain point, if you're surrounded by a culture dedicated to glorifying you and everyone
you meet is so happy to see you and, oh my god, all your pronouncements are so good.
You know what? If you make a decision that's wrong, the people around you, it's their job to
tell you why it's not your fault. It's the fault of the Wreckers or it's the fault of Hitler or
whoever it is, the Kulaks. At a certain point, the human mind wants to believe how great it is,
especially someone in that vaunted position.
There was this one funny, I'm using the word loosely, quote, when Hitler invades Russia
and he couldn't believe it and he's just missing in action for days because how could Hitler betray
me? We had a deal, birds of a feather, and he had this quote about we've taken Lenin's legacy
and shit it out of our asses. I think he was very aware, that's no question that he was aware,
that in terms of being a philosopher or a thinker, he wasn't on Lenin's level. That was,
I'm sure, played a lot into his psychology. He never quite lived up to everything he tried.
I mean, there's some sense that the collectivization, that this idea was a failure,
the way he responds to the economic policy being a failure, is to lean in and basically
torture anyone who says it's a failure and double down on the policy. That says something about...
But it wasn't a failure, it broke the Ukrainians.
You don't think he believed early on, that's what it turned into, but you don't think in the very
early days there was a thought that collectivization is the right mechanism by which to enact communism
in the nation. I think his goal was to break their spirit and getting them fed with secondary,
right? And given the fact that they stopped complaining because they're dead, he got what
he wanted. He got a compliant population. I mean, that's really interesting. I didn't...
I wonder how much disagreement there is about, because if that was the goal from the beginning,
that's a different level of evil. I think that was clearly the... So his...
Like I said earlier, he broke with Lenin because he wanted socialism in one country,
right? That was his vision, right? And he was also very aware that what became the Soviet Union
was extremely diverse, versus gigantic countries, the big country on earth. It's not always gigantic.
You had all these peoples, these nationalities within it that have had historical enmity,
and they're not going to have loyalty to Moscow. He's a Georgian himself. This was always a big
problem. So that was what he wanted to do as well, is to homogenize and have them be standardized.
And I don't see how you do that without either massive reeducation, which is only going to go
so far, or really just crushing people's spirits. So like a forced homogeneity. Yeah.
And the other big thing, a big element of Soviet culture and the Soviet mythology,
I mean, he called... His name was... He changed his name to Stalin. I can't even pronounce his Georgian
name. Joke is really or something like that. It means man of steel. So a large part of... And
this still remains in Russian culture to this day. I see in my family too, and like other Russians I
know, there is this pride in ruthlessness and this kind of like, I'm so tough, like nothing's
going to affect me. Like, yeah, we're going to suffer, but it's for a greater good or for the
long term, and not to be kind of sentimental or squeamish about things. Like that was a big part
of it. Don't take that away from me too, Michael. Taking everything. Am I wrong? I admire not
stoicism, but that kind of hardness. I look forward to myself. There's nothing to do with Stalin.
But not to the extent that like, for example, like if you see someone suffering and that's being used
as a mechanism to get you change your opinion, you're like, they're not going to get to me.
Like that is very much part of that Russian psychology. Right. At least at that time. Yes.
I think still largely no. I'm not going to be manipulated by someone else's suffering or weakness,
that kind of thing. I think that's really part of it to this day. I don't know. I don't know how
much of its character, how much of its reality. Sure, sure. I remember, I knew that I knew as
someone who's, him and his fiance were Russian and they had this big fight. She took off the ring,
right? And she's like, you know, he's like, that's it. And just like the way he told the story to
me. She's like, what do you want me to say? Oh, don't leave me, baby. I can't live without you.
Like that nasty cruelty. I don't know, man. I know. I know you're, I don't know if there's
a Russian thing. That's just the people thing. I don't think it's an American thing. I think
there's all kinds of flavors and they're different by region of the way that people are cruel to
each other. Sure. I'm not arguing that. In America, New Jersey is different than Texas,
is different than California. You don't think Americans are a higher trust,
more kind society than Russia even today? Higher trust. Listen, I'm not going to, so first of all,
I have a very complex feelings about Russia today. I'm talking about, that's like a January before
the war. I've talked about nowadays. I think it's a complex psychological dynamic of what
trusting means. I think Russians are generally less friendly, but have more intimate friendships.
Yes, I think that's true. So it's just a different.
It's not different. It's just one is more trusting.
Which is more trust. Americans.
But then let's define trusting different. Okay. I'll give you an example. If someone's
having a party in America and people come over. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Everyone's welcome. If
it's in Russia, it's like, who's that? Who'd you bring? And there's much more of a like,
let me be sure that's okay, this person's here. I don't know. I may be. You don't have parties.
I have never been in a party. And you don't come to mine.
Then ask if it was very sad. Well, I love that. I love that. Well,
you should have showed it by showing up. Man, I hide from the world and I'm afraid of social
interaction and I just lay on the ground instead and feel sorry for myself.
It's not bad Santa. It's sad Santa. Well, I can serve. I can serve my emotional energy towards
this one day of the year. Okay. Intensely spread my joy. All right. Speaking of which,
you tell a Christmas story in the book. Are you spoiling that chapter? It's called Die Hard.
All right. Well, I'm not going to spoil it. It's really good. I was very proud of that chapter.
Why? Because the ending that's a Christmas story is just like, I know everyone reading,
it's going to go Google it. He's going to be real. Then it was on Christmas yesterday.
I mean, this has to do with the bigger picture. We don't have to do the big reveal,
but the bigger picture of there, there was an iron curtain and it was coming down
in complex ways. How would you define the iron curtain? There's a set of ideologies,
a set of countries united by an ideology and a set of countries united by a different ideology.
There's a curtain that divided them and it eventually came down. How would you describe
how it came down? I hate that I can never remember, ever, ever remember if this was Hemingway.
No, it was Hemingway. It was Mark Twain. No, it came down two ways, gradually then suddenly.
The thing with the iron curtain and the Warsaw Pact, these were a bunch of
nations under communism, but they were all, almost all, under the sway of Moscow.
If they were going to make big changes, Moscow had to prove it. It was in the 50s when Hungary
decided to rebel, or not rebel, liberalize. They were thinking of leaving the Warsaw Pact
and the Russians sent in the tanks. You had the development of what was called the Brezhnev Doctrine,
which was the idea that it is the duty of all the Warsaw Pact nations if another country tries to,
and this was also in 68 in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, if a nation wants to leave
socialism, it is incumbent of those socialist nations to do whatever is necessary to make
sure there is an counter-revolution. They were very much under Moscow's thumb.
One of the big ways it changed was one man, and that was Mikhail Gorbachev. He was the first
Russian leader to be born after the October Revolution. He grew up and his grandfather was
arrested for being a Trotskyite, and the other one was arrested for this or that. He saw his
village starve as a result of Stalin. Even though he was a very committed communist, he also was
very and increasingly skeptical of authoritarianism. In Poland, for example, you had the Solidarity
Movement. This was a labor union movement, and the government didn't know what to do. They were
getting a lot of support from the peoples. They had strikes in the Gdansk shipyard when
them started. Basically, Moscow told them, either you crack down or we're cracking down on you.
They're like, all right. They declared martial law, and the rest of the leaders put them away,
but then when Gorbachev was in charge, there wasn't a gun to their back. It was the communist
leaders themselves who were like, you know what? There was this really funny moment where
Lekvalese is meeting with Margaret Thatcher, and he's telling her what Solidarity the movement
wants, and she had been meeting with the Polish government as well. She's like, look, tell them
because they wanted the government wanted her to tell them that we wanted to negotiate and
work with them. She goes, all right, tell the government what it is that you're asking for,
and he just points to the ceiling. She goes, oh, yeah, our meetings are bugged anyway. But
they then had the freedom because they knew that Gorbachev wasn't forcing them to drive
Solidarity underground. They had the idea of let's work together with these people. As a result of
this, Poland liberalized and freed itself fairly easily and with a minimum of bloodshed in 89.
And there was this whole argument for the Vietnam War with something called domino theory,
which is if you lose Vietnam, then you're going to lose Laos, then you lose Cambodia.
One by one, the countries are going to turn communist like dominoes, but people didn't
realize the reverse was true because after Poland liberalized, then you have Hungary,
then you have Czechoslovakia, then you had East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So it's a great thing because as this is happening, the people are looking around, and they're like,
wait, that's it. This has got to be a trick. And it wasn't a trick. So one of my favorite books,
which was a big inspiration for this one, was by my favorite historian. I apologize to Victor
Petrosha, David Petrosha and Arthur Herman, my second and third. They're tied. But Victor
Sebastien wrote a book called Revolution 1989. And he just talked about that year and how all
these countries, one after another, liberalized. And it's just such a beauty. And none of them
thought this was possible. One of my favorite, favorite moments in this book is Helmut Kohl,
who was the head of West Germany, is in Warsaw with Lech Walesa discussing the Berlin Wall.
And Lech Walesa is like, I don't think it's getting around for another few years. And
Helmut Kohl laughs in his face. And he goes, look, you're young. This isn't how things work.
Like this is going to take some doing. It fell the next day. And Helmut Kohl literally says,
I'm at the wrong party. And he got in a plane and got out of Warsaw. So there are why this book
has a broader message than the actual stories of these incidents is that as these wonderful
things are happening, the universal consensus at the time is it's never going to happen.
Or if it does have going to happen, it's going to happen only through an enormous amount
of carnage and blood. And when it doesn't, then everyone's like, oh, it was inevitable.
You didn't say it was inevitable at the time. You only said it was inevitable after the fact.
And the other thing that I was really brought me a lot of joy is there are so many moments
of men with guns saying, we're not shooting anyone because they wanted several Tiananmen squares.
They wanted it in East Berlin. They wanted it in Romania. They wanted it in Moscow. And these
strong, tough trained men with guns were like, no, we're not shooting the civilians. And then
then everything else was history. Yeah. Just as surprising as the mass violence committed by
like police and the army on its own citizenry equally surprising as when they choose not to.
Yeah. Somehow. Yeah. And what is that? How do you explain 1989? How do you explain this
progress that happened so suddenly? How do you explain that in the, at the beginning of the 20th
century, so much revolution happened that created communism? And how do you explain then the collapse
of that across so many nations at the same time? I think a large part of it had to do with the
closer interconnections between people like Gorbachev and Thatcher and Gorbachev and Reagan.
Because both of them visited Red Square. And in the years before, these are enemies. They
want to invade. They want to kill us. The Americans thought this is about the Russians. The Russians
thought this is about the Americans, obviously not so much the British. And they got on really well
when Gorbachev came to checkers, which is the prime minister's countryside estate. Thatcher sat him
down and she's lecturing him about human rights and she's lecturing him about economics and she's
lecturing about this and that. And then she's lecturing him about why he's in eating while
he's yelling at her. And he goes, Mrs. Thatcher, like, I know you have a lot of strong opinions.
I do too. I haven't been sent here to recruit you to the Communist Party. And she just started
laughing. But right away, there was such a sense in the air of we can do better. We're spending
all this money on missiles. We're spending all this money on the military. It's expensive. And for
what? We don't have to be looking at each other as enemies. We can try to work together to kind
of at the very least lower the volume and the heat. How much credit do you give to Gorbachev,
the man? So meaning, how much power does a single individual have? I could not give him
more credit. I had a tweet last year where I said, who do you think is the greatest person
alive right now? And my answer by far would be Gorbachev. Then he died. I don't know who it is
right now. But it's just funny because Gorbachev also had a tweet. But he said, oh, sure.
That would be a good, now I wish I interviewed Gorbachev and asked him the
the famous question of what would you like best about Michael Malys?
The transition after the Soviet Union fell to Russia and Yeltsin was not a smooth one by any
means. As I say at the end of the book, it's not like they lived happily ever after. But my point,
broader point is you take the wins when you can get them. People now had access to passports.
They don't have to have, they can leave the country. They have food. They have access to
information. It's somewhat censored, but it's certainly nothing like it was under the Soviet
Union. And they didn't have to live in this kind of constant fear. And they had opportunities.
And it's such a step forward. And there was this one great moment. And there's a super,
Boris Yeltsin became president of Russia. He's also mayor of Moscow at one point,
or the equivalent of mayor. And he came here to visit NASA in the capacity of one or the other.
And while he was there, he went to visit a supermarket. It was a Randall's. Then I think
it's a food town now. It still exists. I'm going to go there. I'm going to start balling.
And as he's looking around, like he had never seen so much food. And this is food that like
even wealthy people in Russia don't have access to. And there's pictures of him just like this,
like what? And the scene that really was poignant to me is on his flight back.
He's sitting there on the plane like this. And he's like, they had to lie to the people
because if they knew, they wouldn't have been able to get away with it. And that's the moment
where it's just like, oh, this wasn't like skewed propaganda. You know, this was like, they knew.
And it was a lie from A to Z. And he was just like, holy crap, just like, and you can just imagine
him on that plane, his brain reprogramming. Because if you're taught since you're a kid,
and he was an older man, he was no dummy, you think, okay, the Americans are starving and poor,
and they're lynching people every day. And then you go to a supermarket, the most banal
place on earth, and you see like, I think when the article said like, they couldn't believe how
big the onions were or something like that. And you're seeing this and you're seeing these like
janitors, school teachers, these aren't dignitaries. And they're regular people just
picking whatever they want. And you're just like, like, like you, it's like the equivalent of having
a stroke. Yeah, I do think that that's one of the most powerful things is the grocery, the grocery
store is like, in terms of drawing a distinction between the two systems. Yeah. Because, you know,
you could have like technology, you can show off technology and so on. But you can kind of sign
right off technology is like, okay, that's the mechanism of the devil. But when you look at just
fruit and veggies, and like very big fruit and veggies, and like, yeah, and fruit in particular,
like certain kinds of fruit, they're just not available in Russia. I mean, yeah, that really
shows. Wait a minute. Yeah. It's interesting, like when you're older and you have to face
the reality that what you believe to be true, that your whole life has been based on a set of lies.
And you're not not not mistakes, not like a little bit like blatant lies from top to bottom,
start to finish that I don't know what that's like. How much you've, you start the book,
I think you start the book with Iran. Yes. Yes. Yes. As one does. So before the revolution,
she was born in Russia, she witnessed the revolution and moved to the United States in the
2026. I remember like it was yesterday. Anyway, she, you write that she spent a lot of her life
trying to convince Americans in the world that the negative effects of totalitarian government,
just, you know, maybe using her as an example, but also this question, can we draw a distinction
between authoritarian regimes and communism? Is it possible to steal man the case that
not all implementations of socialism and communism would lead to the atrocities we've
seen in the Soviet Union and in China under Mao? Like when you, in studying all of this,
how much blame do you put on the ideologies, on Marxist ideologies, versus the particular
leaders and dictators? Well, you have to blame the leaders a lot because they had different
leaders in different countries were different from each other. Dubczyk, who took over Czechoslovakia
and he tried to introduce socialism with the human face in the Prague Spring of 1968, he was like,
all right, we got to do away with this authoritarianism. We got to have more free speech. He was
thinking of introducing elements of democracy. Now then the Russians sent in the tanks,
but the point is he certainly was someone who was like, all right, this, this has got to stop.
This is just absolutely crazy. Khrushchev and Stalin were not the same animal at all.
So I think the problem with communism in the Marxist sense is that you're going to have an
introduce an element of authoritarianism simply because you can't have economic planning. If I
don't have a price mechanism, I don't know how price is what is be knowing as a consumer or a
producer what should be produced or what there's a shortage of. As prices increase, that's a signal
that we have a shortage here. As prices decrease, that means that there's a surplus here. But if
I'm setting the price, I don't really have know how much weed I need to produce if I'm compared
to corn as compared to shoes as compared to Santa costumes. So that is a big problem. The other
issue is if you have one agency, the government, having a monopoly on let's suppose the news,
like you were talking about earlier with Twitter, it's going to be really hard to have any kind of
objective discourse because everyone is going to be working for the same organization. That is
going to cause a problem in terms of having a feedback mechanism, even in the best scenario,
in terms of this is a problem, this isn't a problem. And when you have a monopoly,
which is what a government is, I think people are very familiar with what the problems
happen with monopoly, this lack of accountability, bureaucracies are faceless and then no one's to
blame and yet everyone suffers as a consequence. So it doesn't necessarily have to be as authoritarian
as Stalinism, but you can't have a government, which is authority by its nature, be this pervasive
without a strong amount of oppression. Same thing with even if you just have like let's
suppose socialized healthcare, you're going to have to make it illegal for doctors to practice
privately, you're going to have to have rationing, so on and so forth. Now, that might be a price
that people are willing to pay because you can't have infinite spending on healthcare, right?
So something's going to have to give somewhere. So there is an element of authoritarianism there
and people are comfortable with that and I can wrap my head around it. But if you're going to have
one organization running literally everything in society, I don't see how you do that and have any
measure of liberalism. Why do you think Ayn Rand had so much trouble telling people the danger of
Soviet Stalinism? Well, I think a more pertinent question is why did Emma Goldman and Alexander
Berkman have so much problems? So they were hardcore anarchists. Yeah, they were Emma
Goldman's on the cover. They were deported from the US. J. Edgar Hoover saw them off at Ellis
Island. They were sent to Russia. They were bloodthirsty revolutionaries. They had no shortage
advocating violence when necessary. And when they went there, they were just like,
this is a complete nightmare. They both individually had meetings with Lenin complaining
about political prisoners complaining about lack of free speech. She told them, you know,
this is a revolutionary time. You could do that later. And when they both left,
they, she wrote a, her memoir was split into two books, My Disillusionment in Russia and
My Fur Disillusionment in Russia. He wrote The Bolshevik Myth and she was in England and she
gave a speech and she's just like, if you guys think this is for the workers, this is the biggest
live ever heard. Like they're oppressing the workers like no capitalist has ever imagined.
And, you know, as she described it, like people just shifting their seats, they were interrupting her
and she, when she opened her talk, she had a standing ovation. And when she was done,
you could hear a pin drop. So they didn't want to hear it because this was this kind of, and Eugene
Lyons talks about it later. This was like the guinea pig theory of the Russian people. Like
we're going to experiment on them over there. If it works, great. We're right. If it's wrong,
it's their problem. And sure, these animals squeal, but they're beneath us. And of course,
they're going to make some noise. But, you know, this is a noble experiment, but they're
experimenting on a country, several countries. So I think an ideology like this, which appeals
to intellectuals, because, you know, if it works or if it's implemented, they're the ones who are
gods, in effect, in a society, like their status cannot be higher. They really want this to work.
Like they want a society where they are the new aristocracy, the most important people.
And their criticisms of America, if they had a binary worldview, if America is bad, and this is
the opposite of America, they're my definition, it's good. And the other binary that they bought
into is, you know, the Nazis and the fascists hate the communists and the communists, it's true,
up to a point, hated the fascists and the Nazis. Okay. Well, Hitler is evil. So this guy's against
Hitler. We're with him. So that's an argument that's still made in, you know, schools growing up
when you talk about World War II, where they're like, we've seen it with Stalin. And they don't
really talk about Stalin being a bad guy. But it's like, you know, we worked with him to fight
Hitler because Hitler was a unique evil. Now, that is certainly true that Hitler's a unique evil,
but that doesn't mean or even imply that Stalin is somehow an angel or a saint.
Do you think some of the lessons of history are forgotten here in our,
in our modern political discourse that are important to remember?
I was so triggered because I was in the supermarket and there was like a company
that's selling Russian ice cream because it meets these high level Soviet standards.
And I'm just like, you think this is some kind of joke? You think this is some kind of kitschy
punchline that you had decades of people who were taught in school to turn their parents
into the police if they were hoarding grain, even if it cost them their own lives, where it was a
crime to be married to someone who was an enemy of the state, where you had torture being the norm,
where people institutionalized because they were politically disadvantageous and they were called
insane. Like this isn't just like, oh, this hammer and sickle is this cool wacky symbol. Like the
amount of blood under this symbol was just enormous. And so yeah, I think that lesson
has very much been forgotten. How did the ice cream taste? It was fine.
I'm a Baskin Robbins guy to be honest, but Van Luen's does some great work.
Baskin Robbins doesn't have any Soviet flavors? No. Those dark jokes. Dark jokes.
I'm going to self publish a book of jokes.
Coming out in a grocery store near you. Okay. What was the hardest part about writing this
book? It's been two years writing it. So when I write books for celebrities and I was co-authoring
them, I did it kind of like method acting. I tried to get into their head as much as possible to
kind of speak in their voice. And when you're dealing with children being tortured, harmed,
starved, and you're trying to empathize with the characters, it's hard to take. The other big part
I had, like I was saying earlier, is just I was just very, very concerned that I told this story
and did it justice. Because I think this is something that is, I still don't understand,
and I'm kind of angry about it, that it's fallen on me to tell this story. This isn't some
minor incident that happened, some random town in Pica State. This is half the world for 70,
80 years. And the fact that it's, this is the 80s. I mean, you and I are old enough to remember
the 80s. There's a show, I remember the 80s. The fact that all these things have just kind of,
we have this collective amnesia. And even amnesia, I think a lot of this stuff was not known even
at the time or was kind of obscured. This is, I remember I was at the Blaze, which is a network
run by Glenn Beck, and they're conservatives. And I have a lot of fun there. And I'm just sitting
there, and you know, sometimes they veer off, they're like, oh, Biden's the communist. I'm like,
okay, okay, Biden's the communist. But I'm like, we talk so much about, you know, slavery and the
Civil War, the atrocities. We talk about World War II and the Holocaust. I'm like, how is no one
talking about this? And this can very easily be portrayed as like conservatism's big victory,
because Reagan and Thatcher were so instrumental in guiding this to a safe landing. And I'm like,
how is no one telling this story? And then one day, my brain is like, you know, you
write books for a living, this is kind of your job. And I'm like, all right, but I still don't,
I still, I got to tell you, I'm kind of confused that I'm the one who has to do this, because
this should be, this should be, you know, this should be a dirty books like this. And this is
a model to follow. Yeah. And it's also that it's such recent history. Yeah. But it also kind of
makes you realize that there might be other fights for progress going on right now.
Oh, yes. The world that we don't know about. So you wrote about North Korea. I don't know to
what degree there is, could possibly be fights there for progress. But there could be, they could
be boiling up in China. There could be boiling up battles for progress in other parts of the world,
Russia, that could be. And in America. In America. And these are all different kind of battles for
progress. And they're all sometimes, sometimes I, you know, we sometimes tend to criticize
these battles for progress. Like, if it's on the left, we'll call it like wokeism or whatever.
And we pick extreme elements of it and show how silly and ridiculous it is, not realizing it,
not acknowledging that there's a more civil battle going on underneath for actual, for
respecting human dignity from all, for people who all walks of life. And the same,
we tend to call anybody who questions mainstream narratives, conspiracy theories,
we dismiss them immediately. And they're ultimately fighting for progress. So people who
criticize fallacy and everybody else. I don't know if they're, I think they want
institutions that serve the public, they're fighting for progress too. And we tend to
dismiss them, like each side tends to caricature the other. But the battle for progress is
happening. And I guess that's what you're, that's the hopeful message with the white pill, right?
Is that there, there's progress being made. Somehow we're all making progress here.
I think more of the hopeful message is that it's not possible that we have to lose. Like,
if someone tells you the straight face, you can't win, the enemy is too impressive and strong. I'm
like, what are you talking about? We, I mean, look, this was the Soviet Union. And it happened,
you know, relatively quickly and, and relatively peacefully. I mean, again, and it wasn't because
the Hanukkah in East Germany was like, Oh, I just gonna, I'm just going to vacate my seat. He was
like sending the tanks and the military guy said no. So they wanted blood. There were plenty
of people who wanted blood and would have been happy to have it. So to you, the, maybe if not
the fall of the Soviet Union, then the fall of the iron curtain is a great leap of progress
in the 20th century. I don't see how anyone can argue against that point with a straight face.
So that gives you hope that we, that we humanity were able to do that.
Yes. And at the same time, we were told at the time, give it up, be realistic. It's utopian to
think this is going anywhere, maybe in 100 years. Look, there's a reason checkup was on Star Trek,
because the idea is even the far future, you're going to have America and you're going to have
the Soviet Union. Like this is the reality. It was called real politic. We're going to update
taunt because it's, you know, it's this permanent stalemate. We had the Vietnam war. We got our
asses kicked. Russia's not going anywhere. America's not going anywhere. We got to learn to live
each other, blah, blah, blah. And Reagan said, you don't want to hear my strategy for the Cold War.
Some people might say it's simple or even simplistic. Here it is. We win, they lose.
And the people who won were the Russian people and the Ukrainian people and the Lithuanian people
and the Polish people and the Romanian people especially and the Hungarian people. And it's
just, there's so many moments of great joy that, you know, just tears coming down my face because
you're like in Prague when Dubcek, again, who tried to liberalize in 1968. And then when they
send the tanks, they deport him to Slovakia somewhere to do some forestry job. Like he appears
in their big squares just waving from the balcony, like this ghost from 20 years prior being like,
look, you know, the spirit of 68 is still alive here in Czechoslovakia. And it was like a matter
of weeks. The entire government resigned and then they liberalized. It's just so many things about
just overnight, just change for the profound better. And, you know, people are so committed
to making sure you don't have hope. And if things get better, oh, it doesn't really matter because
the broader picture never gets better. And there's lots of data to the contrary where that's happened
before. And this isn't some magical faraway place. This is the opposite of magical faraway
place. The opposite of magical faraway place. It's Eastern Europe. And to me, I think one such
narrative that people assume will always be true or just to a degree will always be true,
like in American politics is the extreme levels of division. And it seems to me like that too,
we can overcome. So the division in American politics that seems to be kind of productive,
I think that can be overcome. And I think the division in geopolitics currently
with Russia, China, and the United States, particularly China and the United States,
can be overcome. And I think that requires great leadership
that galvanizes the populace to the better angels of their nature. Like, I have hope for that.
People have become really cynical on social media and elsewhere in the way they talk.
The liberals are destroying this country. The conservatives are destroying this country.
This kind of language is becoming more and more popular. I think that's, I have hope that that's
temporary. At least that's my weight pill. I don't know if you have that kind of hope for,
like what does hope look like for you in American politics? Forget American politics,
American, the nation, the country, the people? My hope, which I don't think is an unrealistic one,
is that the next generation has a better life than you and I have had in this country.
And I think anyone who thinks that America is over or is one president away from being destroyed
cannot, in good conscience, call themselves a patriot. Because if you think America is so weak
that it takes a Biden or a Trump or an Obama to irrevocably destroy it, then it's already a wrap.
And I think that's just absolutely ridiculous. If you look at what this country has survived,
Great Depression, World War II, the Civil War, I mean, my God. So we've been through worse before.
It wasn't always easy, certainly not. But it's so hard for me as someone who's a hopeful person,
not by my nature. I'm not Michael Kynness, who does work for Random House, or at least he did
last time I talked to him. I look at, even like, the thing is, when you speak positively,
it sounds corny. That's how it screwed up our cynical culture. Have you seen my Twitter?
Oh, you're verified now. So that's good. But even like something like Etsy,
like you can go on Etsy. I paid $8 for that verification.
I earned it. It's an opportunity for independent artists to create something special and cool.
And I've bought a lot of stuff from them. That in and of itself is something that's pretty awesome.
There's so much, I'm into shaving soaps, right? Of course you are.
The point is, there's like dozens of artisans every day when you have a shave, it brings you
some joy. So there's just so many things that are wonderful. And I know there's people listening to
this, rolling their eyes. How can you talk about shaving soaps when my daughter, or when my wife,
or when blah, blah, blah. And I'm not disparaging or dismissing what you're regarding as a problem.
My point is, hope means the belief that it's not at all a certainty that this problem will
be insurmountable. That's all it means. What do you look forward to in 2023?
Since this is a holiday special? Honestly, like if I look forward
to a lot of young people realizing that they still have lots of opportunity in this country
and taking control of their own selves and realizing they can be a better person tomorrow
than they are today, that the entirety of their identity is not a function of a culture
which may they may not identify with, or like, or think is deplorable, and realize,
you know what, I have it in me to improve and find joy and happiness. And also,
the fact that that is so compelling and contagious. That is what I would want in 2023.
And also for New York to get nuked. So those two things could be accomplished.
Can I go back and switch the order? Because I think New York won.
Oh, the jokes, the jokes. And one day, friends, if you work hard enough in believing yourself.
You too can nuke New York. No, you too can spend your
days dressing up, grown men dressing up in a Santa outfit and putting on lipstick and having
hours upon hours of conversation with each other and loving every second. Thank you for writing
this really, really important book. Please buy the white pill. I love you, brother.
I love you too. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malis. To support
this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you
some words from Michelle Silverstein. Listen to the musons, child. Listen to the don'ts.
Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never has, then listen close
to me. Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.